Life Engineering

Engineering a fulfilling life.

[Life Engineering @MADEngineering_]

Started working on app project.
Concepts ✅️
Developer account ✅️

[Life Engineering @MADEngineering_]

Spent whole yesterday's evening working on a dashboard and data aggregation platform to allow me automate e-commerce business management operations so I have more time for other ventures.

[Life Engineering @MADEngineering_]

@PeterMcCormack Great job! One notice though -
Club history page isn't there:

[Life Engineering @MADEngineering_]

If being a successful solo entrepreneur these days is a skill issue. What exactly is that skill I wonder?
And the answer I think is the same as it must have been always - agency. Just not sure if this is actually a skill..
Will try to work on that.

[Life Engineering @MADEngineering_]

Got the e-commerce store running again after returning from vacation.

Other activities were running and gardening.
Nothing too productive regarding the future project. (1 failed 3d print iteration)

[Life Engineering @MADEngineering_]

Goal is to build in public. This is the start.
Always felt good at leadership roles, so I think it should transfer pretty well to managing Ai. Will see how it goes 😀

[Willy Woo @willywoo]

George Orwell was 40 years early in his prediction, we needed the advent of widespread social media before his 1984 vision could be executed. The moment it became technically possible, the power hungry went for it.

[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.

[Greg Brockman @gdb]

One challenge with predicting the impact of a future technology is anticipating how the world will change in the interim. Describing Uber before the Internet, smartphones, and GPS seems quite hard—and yet for advanced AI we must. Fortunately, lots to learn from recent progress.