cheesecakeMafia

I pretend.

[cheesecakeMafia @Cheesecak_Mafia]

@Gingfacekillah Aye captain! I had the same thoughts when I realised that risk, volatility and uncertainty are different ideas, and how we define and measure them determines whether they are same or different. Ergo definition, assumptions, axioms they carry are critical.

[Andrew Mack @Gingfacekillah]

Something I'd add to your notes:

There is no such "thing" as volatility. The way you measure it changes what you see. There are different ways to measure it / look at it. Think about the baked-in assumptions. Don't just parrot what you're told - think.

[Arpit Bhayani @arpit_bhayani]

Never look at optimization in isolation. It only makes sense in the context of constraints. Every optimization is a trade. There is no free lunch.

Take indexing in a database. An index makes reads faster, but it does not come for free. Every write now has to update the index, too, so insert and update latency go up. Storage grows. You have traded write cost for read speed.

Concurrency control is another one. Optimistic locking gives you high throughput when conflicts are rare, but when they are not, you pay in retries and wasted work. Pessimistic locking protects you from that cost, but now every transaction locks entities even when no conflict would have happened.

You will never find an option with no downside. Hence, when you are trying to optimize on one axis, find an axis on which you can relax.

Optimization is just a negotiation game. :)

Hope this helps.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

This sentence by Dostoyevsky hits hard:

“You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.”

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

One of the worst lies you tell yourself: “I just need to gather more information.”

Carl Jung coined the archetype of Puer Aeternus (Latin for the "eternal boy") as an adult who lives in a constant state of boyhood, with a fear of commitment and an obsession with preparation for action that never comes.

The modern world has made it easier than ever to fall into the Puer Aeturnus trap. Information gathering has become sport. Research, studying, learning, planning. All of it jammed into neat little dopamine feedback loops that convince you that you're doing something productive and valuable.

You're just one piece of information away from the big breakthrough. You'll start the business when your business plan is perfected. You'll meet your partner when you've scrolled through another round of profiles. You'll get that dream job when you have one more degree in hand.

I've been there. I was Puer Aeternus. Until I realized that the world wasn't being run by a bunch of geniuses with 47 PhDs and 170 IQs. The world was being run by a bunch of normal people with abnormal bias for action.

The opportunity you seek is floating around at all times. But you have to take action to seize it. Dopamine from information gathering is a dangerous drug. Get your dopamine from action.

[Arpit Bhayani @arpit_bhayani]

Looking back, three shifts in how I think and learn had an outsized impact. I wish I had made them on day one.

1. became more data-driven
2. started seeking contrary opinions
3. started learning tougher topics

Start doing this as early as you can; it directly impacts your career growth, acceleration, output, and outcomes. The sooner the better.

Hope this helps.

[Gokul Rajaram @gokulr]

After using Claude Code (Opus 4.7/4.8) and Codex (GPT-5.5) incessantly for the past several weeks, my verdict is that (like every human) their greatest strength is also their greatest weakness.

tl;dr Use Claude Code + Opus 4.7/8 for brainstorming and planning. Use Codex + GPT 5.5 for execution and building. Use both to adversarially review each other's plans / design docs.

CC is really creative and a great brainstorming partner. However, this creativity makes it hallucinate when executing.

Codex is an incredible, focused, fast executor and builder. However, this makes it poor at generating new, creative options.

(I have friends at both OpenAI and Anthropic who agree with the above and use the "other" lab's product for precisely the use cases that their product is not good at).

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

I'm convinced that 99% of success is just the ability to outlast uncertainty. The one who can tolerate the most uncertainty is the one who will eventually win.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

“You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

[ByteSmith 𓂆 @dbytesmith]

Sometimes I feel there is no point in building anything anymore. Every few weeks a new model drops, and suddenly everyone is a farmer, doctor, lawyer, physicist, quant, artist, compiler engineer, kernel hacker, and Nobel Prize contender all at once.

The confidence is infinite. The context is not.

Meanwhile social media is flooded with MVPs, demos, generated screenshots, LLM-generated apps, LLM-generated businesses, LLM-generated everything.

Sometimes it feels as though we're heading toward a future where every person has their own software. And the only user is its creator.

People celebrate the artifact. Production quietly laughs at the artifact. Because production is where nuance lives. Production is where assumptions go to die. Production is where edge cases collect compound interest.

The funny thing is that LLMs seem to be reinventing the same thing humans have always done. Approximate reality. Then market the approximation as reality.

Perhaps the answer is to stop competing in the crowded town square. Build in obscure corners. Work on problems nobody cares about until they suddenly do. Pick domains where understanding matters more than prompting.

Do things that are difficult to explain, difficult to automate, and difficult to commoditize. And perhaps most importantly, stop publishing every thought, design, experiment, and mistake for the training pipeline to consume.

Midnight thoughts from a mind wandering through the wilderness of its own questions and the chaos of the world around it.

[Peter Steinberger 🦞 @steipete]

Here's a simple loop: Tell codex to maintain your repos, wake up every 5 minutes and direct work to threads. That makes it easy to parallelize+steer work as needed.

I use a orchestrator skill combined with my triage+autoreview+computer use skills, so some work can land autonomously. https://t.co/FbBoJTIcfd
https://t.co/8389roVnOm

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

I’m convinced discipline is just the highest form of self-respect. It’s choosing what you want most over what you want now. It’s keeping your word. It’s an act of service to your future self.

[Gurwinder @G_S_Bhogal]

“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”

― Frank Herbert

[Lance Breitstein 🇺🇸🌎 @TheOneLanceB]

AVOIDING CRITICISM HARMS YOU & THEM

Early on in my work with SMB Capital, there was a trainee that was not meeting the standards of the firm. As a result, during a meeting, Bella chewed out this trainee regarding the quality of his work. Feeling bad for the trainee, I softened the blow by telling him it would be okay and that he's working hard and all these other platitudes at the end of the call.

After the meeting, Bella told me to never do that again because I was softening his message to the trader and ultimately hurting the trader's and the firm's long-term prospects, because if he does not learn that lesson, he will not be at the job in another few months.

As most humans do, I initially got defensive, but then the more I thought about it, I realized how right he was. If this message was not hammered into the trainee, he actually would be gone and his dreams would be broken. The trainee still had the possibility for change, but only if the emotional drive was strong enough to create new behavior.

So often in life, we avoid giving feedback because we don't want to hurt the other person's feelings. Yes, there absolutely is a productive and an unproductive way to give feedback. One of the most important skills in life is being able to give feedback in the most productive manner possible. Too soft and they don't listen. Too harsh and they get defensive and unresponsive.

Similarly, in life, it is just as important to be able to learn to receive feedback. We all get defensive. It is our ego and human nature, but with time we learn to tone that response down and objectively listen to the feedback to find out whether it is true and whether it is actionable. There is tons of feedback that isn't true and can be dismissed, and there's tons of feedback that isn't actionable and ultimately we can't change. The feedback that comes from a position of caring to help us be better is the feedback we must take.

Almost comically, what inspired me to write this post is that a local small business bagel shop opened up by me. Many in the area love to see small local businesses thrive. The truth is, though, that the bagels were not good and barely edible because of how crispy and chewy they were.

Despite this, many of the reviews gush about how important it is to have small local businesses but avoid giving the hard feedback that is necessary for this business to thrive in the long run.

If you do not give the necessary feedback, counterintuitively, the business will actually fail, and your actions are counterproductive to what your goals are. Sometimes in life, the nicest thing you can ever do for someone or something is to give the hard feedback to help them be better.

Additionally, avoiding feedback also hurts you. Not only are you suppressing your own thoughts and feelings, but if you care about something or you care about an outcome, good feedback helps you make sure your needs are met and the outcome you hope for occurs.

If you care about the prospects of a trainee or a business or a person, you end up harming yourself AND them by not giving them the feedback to succeed and grow. You’re avoiding short-term discomfort at the cost of long-term success.

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

Math becomes overpowered when you stop treating it as a standalone trophy and start attaching it to real domains.

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

An easy way to get unstuck is to get up and take a walk.

We generate more creative ideas during and after walking outdoors—and even on a treadmill facing a blank wall.

Divergent thinking rarely happens when we're tethered to a desk. Moving our bodies frees our minds.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

I’m convinced that no matter how you choose to live, people will tell you that you’re doing it wrong. Wrong priorities. Wrong work. Wrong relationships. Wrong whatever. Your entire life will change the moment you learn to smile, nod, and ignore every single one of them.

[Sarthak Sidhant @sidhant_sarthak]

very nice investigation, i wonder who did it

[Gurwinder @G_S_Bhogal]

Of all human qualities, intelligence is relatively common. Much rarer are the character traits that make intelligence useful: curiosity, humility, and agency.

[DHH @dhh]

You can’t outwork the whole world. There’s always going to be someone somewhere willing to work as hard as you. Someone just as hungry. Or hungrier.

Assuming you can work harder and longer than someone else is giving yourself too much credit for your effort and not enough for theirs. Putting in 1,001 hours to someone else’s 1,000 isn’t going to tip the scale in your favor.

What’s worse is when management holds up certain people as having a great “work ethic” because they’re always around, always available, always working. That’s a terrible example of a work ethic and a great example of someone who’s overworked.

A great work ethic isn’t about working whenever you’re called upon. It’s about doing what you say you’re going to do, putting in a fair day’s work, respecting the work, respecting the customer, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, and not being a bottleneck. Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person that others can count on and enjoy working with.

So how do people get ahead if it’s not about outworking everyone else?

People make it because they’re talented, they’re lucky, they’re in the right place at the right time, they know how to work with other people, they know how to sell an idea, they know what moves people, they can tell a story, they know which details matter and which don’t, they can see the big and small pictures in every situation, and they know how to do something with an opportunity. And for so many other reasons.

So get the outwork myth out of your head. Stop equating work ethic with excessive work hours. Neither is going to get you ahead or help you find calm.

[The Outwork Myth — It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy At Work, 2018]