alex

'What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.' - Kelly Clarkson

[McDonald's @McDonalds]

“we have food at home”

ok we also have unresolved family drama at home

[Sam Parr @thesamparr]

Great slide from a deck on how to name your company.

But I think it applies to almost anything creative.

[sam @samdape]

a company dies once the funny people leave

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

Software craftsmanship is over.

The industrial age of programming is here.

[alex @emmentalex]

What If Money Expired? - NOEMA https://t.co/Gv5NLX3fMy

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

# on shortification of "learning"

There are a lot of videos on YouTube/TikTok etc. that give the appearance of education, but if you look closely they are really just entertainment. This is very convenient for everyone involved : the people watching enjoy thinking they are learning (but actually they are just having fun). The people creating this content also enjoy it because fun has a much larger audience, fame and revenue. But as far as learning goes, this is a trap. This content is an epsilon away from watching the Bachelorette. It's like snacking on those "Garden Veggie Straws", which feel like you're eating healthy vegetables until you look at the ingredients.

Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It's not that the quickie doesn't do anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn.

I find it helpful to explicitly declare your intent up front as a sharp, binary variable in your mind. If you are consuming content: are you trying to be entertained or are you trying to learn? And if you are creating content: are you trying to entertain or are you trying to teach? You'll go down a different path in each case. Attempts to seek the stuff in between actually clamp to zero.

So for those who actually want to learn. Unless you are trying to learn something narrow and specific, close those tabs with quick blog posts. Close those tabs of "Learn XYZ in 10 minutes". Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don't just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn.

And for those actually trying to educate, please consider writing/recording longform, designed for someone to get "sweaty", especially in today's era of quantity over quality. Give someone a real workout. This is what I aspire to in my own educational work too. My audience will decrease. The ones that remain might not even like it. But at least we'll learn something.

[Bojan Tunguz @tunguz]

Facts

[andrew gao @itsandrewgao]

A 🧵 of peer reviewed published scientific research where the authors left out a key coauthor 😉:

“As an AI language model…”

@MicrobiomDigest

[bobbyrsec @bobbyrsec]

@_JohnHammond @ngriffin_uk @_JohnHammond

Here's a quick write-up:

https://t.co/wciJ6ixhYS

[Pavel A. Samsonov @PavelASamsonov]

Agile transformation looks like American metrification: we still use the same half-gallon containers but now they're labeled 1.89L

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

3. In the mid-90s, a Children's Hospital in the UK improved its ICU hand-off process by consulting with the Ferrari F1 pit crew team.

The hospital recorded its surgery room operation and the F1 suggested a new protocol: the error rate dropped from 30% to 10%.

[Jon Uleis @MovingToTheSun]

My new favorite thing - Bing's new ChatGPT bot argues with a user, gaslights them about the current year being 2022, says their phone might have a virus, and says "You have not been a good user"

Why? Because the person asked where Avatar 2 is showing nearby

[Pavel A. Samsonov @PavelASamsonov]

devs will join database tables but won't join meetings smh

[Cory Muscara @corymuscara]

35. Monks love to fart while they meditate. The wisdom of letting go expresses itself in many forms.

36. You can't life-hack wisdom. Do the work.

[qing @clarityscape]

occurs to me that not everyone knows about the citrus triangle:

most commercial types of citrus are hybrids of 3 ancestral varieties: citron (the lemoniest lemon), mandarin (the orangest orange), and pomelo (the grapefruitiest grapefruit)

all the variety is interpolation

[Dimitriy V. Masterov @falsedvmaster]

If Chicken McNuggets are sold in packs of 6, 9, or 20, then 43 is the largest number of nuggets that cannot be ordered.

[alex @emmentalex]

Pretty sure this would kill me but I love the idea

1. Use a fad diet (e.g. potato) to get down to 80 kg.
2. Weigh yourself every morning
3. If your average weight over a week ever exceeds 81 kg, spend the next week on the potato diet.
4. Repeat forever. https://t.co/Hlk42dAbtc

[alex @emmentalex]

Great article on how to build a chess engine from scratch by ⁦@willdepue⁩ https://t.co/oYdN1iCoVt

[alex @emmentalex]

Incredible article and visualisations on the inner workings of mechanical watches / Bartosz Ciechanowski https://t.co/vJVgUtGcnV

[alex @emmentalex]

"Imagine a personal heating system that works indoors as well as outdoors, can be taken anywhere, requires little energy, and is independent of any infrastructure."

https://t.co/DW8mI7PGEW