Iskren Ivanov

Senior Software Engineer @Sensorfact Prev: @bol_com @Circularise @Accenture 👨‍💻 Based in Amsterdam 📍 Bulgarian 🇧🇬
but most importantly a parent!

[Iskren Ivanov @dev_iskren]

@mattpocockuk Nice!

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

Two weeks without mobile internet improved mental health more than antidepressants and reversed roughly 10 years of attentional decline.

Screen time dropped 49% (314 to 161 min/day).

[Bruno @use_bruno]

Postman removed free team collaboration.
Bruno collections live in Git.
No seat limits. No BS.

Migrate in minutes.

[Proton Drive @ProtonDrive]

Instead…use Proton Drive where your files are safe and secure: https://t.co/41fAktCdtx

Read more: https://t.co/AE2A3DZrnL

5/5

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

The Terence Tao episode.

We begin with the absolutely ingenious and surprising way in which Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion.

People sometimes say that AI will make especially fast progress at scientific discovery because of tight verification loops.

But the story of how we discovered the shape of our solar system shows how the verification loop for correct ideas can be decades (or even millennia) long.

During this time, what we know today as the better theory can often actually make worse predictions (Copernicus's model of circular orbits around the sun was actually less accurate than Ptolemy's geocentric model).

And the reasons it survives this epistemic hell is some mixture of judgment and heuristics that we don’t even understand well enough to actually articulate, much less codify into an RL loop.

Hope you enjoy!

0:00:00 – Kepler was a high temperature LLM
0:11:44 – How would we know if there’s a new unifying concept within heaps of AI slop?
0:26:10 – The deductive overhang
0:30:31 – Selection bias in reported AI discoveries
0:46:43 – AI makes papers richer and broader, but not deeper
0:53:00 – If AI solves a problem, can humans get understanding out of it?
0:59:20 – We need a semi-formal language for the way that scientists actually talk to each other
1:09:48 – How Terry uses his time
1:17:05 – Human-AI hybrids will dominate math for a lot longer

Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Also let's not forget how Anthropic itself trained Claude: on copyrighted books, only paying copyright holders after a lawsuit.

Again, Anthropic (and other LLMs) have no moral high ground to complain about any other vendors using them as training

https://t.co/r21Xs80RMb

[Chris @criccomini]

The 2nd edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, by @martinkl and me, is finished and sent to the printers! Ebooks available next week, and print books in 3–4 weeks. Sigh of relief. 😅

(BTW, this is a good opportunity to support your favourite local bookshop!)

[Obsidian @obsdmd]

Obsidian Web Clipper 1.0 is now available and adds logic to templates! This adds powerful new tools to convert web pages to markdown.

- if/else
- fallback values for variables
- for loops

This update also adds support for saving articles on X.

[Obsidian @obsdmd]

Anything you can do in Obsidian you can do from the command line.

Obsidian CLI is now available in 1.12 (early access).

[World of Statistics @stats_feed]

Neuroscientist study reveals that Gen Z has become the first generation to be less intelligent than its predecessor, the Millennials.

For the first time in 100 years, young people are scoring lower than their parents on IQ tests and core skills like memory, reading, and focus. This is happening mainly in the US and Europe.

The main cause appears to be excessive screen time and digital device use, particularly in schools and social settings. While some suggest Gen Z is just developing different skills, research shows actual declines in fundamental problem-solving abilities.

[Raspberry Pi @Raspberry_Pi]

The new Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2 is ideal for edge AI applications such as home automation, robotics, facilities management, process control, and privacy-first generative AI deployments.

[Iskren Ivanov @dev_iskren]

@stats_feed I am Bulgarian, and I am willing to bet that in 10 years it will be back to 8.1 million!

[Matt Pocock @mattpocockuk]

The Pragmatic Programmer nails it again

Absolute goldmine in the AI Coding age

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

A Christmas morning reflection…

95%

By the time your child turns 18, you've spent ~95% of the time you will ever spend with them in your lifetime.

There are specific windows, much shorter than you care to admit, during which certain people and relationships will occupy your life.

You may have only one more summer with all of your siblings. Two more trips with that old group of friends. A few more years with your grandpa. A handful of encounters with that coworker you love. One more long walk with your parents.

If you fail to appreciate these windows, they will quickly disappear.

Time Wealth is about an awareness of these windows.

But more importantly, it’s about taking action against that awareness.

It's about recognizing that you are in more control of your time than you realize.

That you can take actions to create time with the people you love most.

That you can bend these curves.

That 95% is an average—and you’ve never wanted to be average in anything your entire life.

So, show up to that recital. Plan that trip with old friends. Grab that quick coffee. Go on that walk with your parents. Have that meal with your sibling.

In the end, it's not about the journey, it's not about the destination, it's about the company. The people along the way.

Cherish the people and the rest will fall into place as it should.

[Adam Wathan @adamwathan]

One of you AI companies better buy us next or I'm going to make a bunch of breaking changes and invalidate all of the code you generate.

[Obsidian @obsdmd]

You can now convert your Notion pages and databases to durable, private, local files.

Your data, offline, forever, for free.

[Iskren Ivanov @dev_iskren]

@obsdmd Amazing work to the Obsidian team. I’m really enjoying this feature

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Was wondering why OpenAI chose to showcase images in the style of Japanse art studio Studio Ghibli - but not, Disney characters, Marvel comics etc.

I suspect b/c Japan is the only major country that made training on copyrighted works legal.

Expect no other country to follow…

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

AI crawlers are wrecking the open internet.

My small side project - techpays .com - used to generate below 100GB of traffic per month. It’s on Render where 500GB/month included, above it’s $30 per 100GB.

Meta’s AI crawler + other bots have pushed it to 700GB per month

WTH

[Iskren Ivanov @dev_iskren]

@bryan_johnson Exactly! I am reading Make it Stick by Peter Brown, it is revealing to see how information is turned into knowledge according to neuroscientific research. Short form content and scrolling true social media feeds is so destructive for your brain…