naveegator.in

  • On the shoulders of those before us

    This Hacker News comment by Spooky23 on the news that immunotherapy drug eliminated aggressive cancers in clinical trial.

    I’m both sad and incredibly happy to read this. I lost my wife recently to a recurring metastatic melanoma. She was treated at MSK by an amazing team.

    It was a terrifying diagnosis and literally would have been a guaranteed death sentence in 2017. In 2023, she had a very real chance of pulling through due to immunotherapy. Unfortunately some complications led to the worst outcome and we lost an amazing woman.

    I remember that my wife said once that the everything she had on that journey was on the shoulders of those before. So maybe in some small way she helped with the research and a future mother, sister, wife, husband, son, dad will have hope where there was none.

    Profound.

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  • Skills

    Josh Swords talking about the four key skills that you need to focus on as you become a senior.

    The biggest gains come from combining disciplines. There are four that show up everywhere: technical skill, product thinking, project execution, and people skills. And the more senior you get, the more you’re expected to contribute to each.

    Technical skill is your chosen craft. Product thinking is knowing what’s worth doing. Project execution is making sure it happens. People skills are how you work with and influence others.

    Every successful effort needs all four.

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  • Nine years as shareholder of Asian Paints

    I am only one year shy of completing ten years with my investment in Asian Paints. But don’t let the number of years fool you into thinking that I am a long term investor. More than half of my investment has come in FY 2023-24 (Figure 1). During the initial years—when the company was going strong and I should have been investing aggressively in it—I was looking the other way and trying to diversify. It was only when effect of Grasim’s entry into paint industry started becoming evident and the Asian Paints’ share price corrected, I made aggressive investments.

    Figure 1
    (more…)
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  • Connection vs engagement

    This post from Sustainable Views reflecting on the commenting culture.

    Broadly speaking, the online platforms we use are not built for connection; they are built for engagement. This is universally true for all internet spaces, from stories to newsfeeds, for the intellectual and the plebian alike. And in the relentless optimization of user engagement, our social engagement is captured and rerouted from its original purpose. Instead of making friends, we are all performing for one collective internet stranger—a being that is sometimes brilliant, sometimes cruel, but always waiting to be impressed.

    It somehow feels like interactions that might have grown a friendship have instead ended up growing ad impressions. This is not strictly true, but I can’t shake the feeling that it isn’t wrong either.

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  • Talk

    Some times I find tiny gems on Hacker News. Today was one of those days. This comment by a user going by the name lordnacho.

    It’s the internet. When you talk to people online, it often descends into pettiness. When you talk to people in the real world, that rarely happens. But it’s much easier to talk online, so people get the wrong impression.

    You should talk to strangers. It’s never gone wrong for me. Most people have a warmth and agreeableness that comes out when you are there with them, talking about stuff. There’s also the interesting effect that people will give you their innermost secrets, knowing you won’t tell anyone (I actually met a serial killer who did this, heh). For instance I was on a long haul flight earlier this year, and my neighbour told me everything about her divorce. Like a kind of therapy.

    I also find when I have a real disagreement with someone, it’s a lot easier when you’re face-to-face. For instance, I have friends who are religious, in a real way, ie they actually think there’s a god who created the earth and wants us to live a certain way. Being there in person keeps me from ridiculing them like I might on an internet forum, but it also keeps them from condemning me to hell.

    So folks, practice talking to people. Much of what’s wrong in the current world is actually loneliness, having no outlet for your expressions.

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  • AI has softened the consequences of procrastination

    Ashanty Rosario talking about the challenges AI presents for education.

    Many homework assignments are due by 11:59 p.m., to be submitted online via Google Classroom. We used to share memes about pounding away at the keyboard at 11:57, anxiously rushing to complete our work on time. These moments were not fun, exactly, but they did draw students together in a shared academic experience. Many of us were propelled by a kind of frantic productivity as we approached midnight, putting the finishing touches on our ideas and work. Now the deadline has been sapped of all meaning. AI has softened the consequences of procrastination and led many students to avoid doing any work at all. As a result, these programs have destroyed much of what tied us together as students. There is little intensity anymore. Relatively few students seem to feel that the work is urgent or that they need to sharpen their own mind. We are struggling to receive the lessons of discipline that used to come from having to complete complicated work on a tight deadline, because chatbots promise to complete our tasks in seconds.

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  • Investment strategy

    M. Pattabiraman dropping truth bombs while sharing his investment strategy.

    I recommend index funds to others so that they avoid repeating my mistakes. And that is what my portfolio is – a sum of all my mistakes made over the years. As I look back, I cannot think of a single intelligent, well-analysed choice.

    […]

    My portfolio was never well-designed or well-diversified. It was and is cluttered. I have learnt to live with it and realised the importance of inaction once your basics are in place during the accumulation phase.

    Instead of worrying about performance and returns, I focused all my energies on how much I can invest and how much I can increase this investment month by month. That has been the key driver of portfolio growth.

    A sum of all my mistakes made over the years—this statement hits the nail right on the head.

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  • Perpetual anxiety

    Noah Smith sharing his thoughts on the recent report about plunging job market among college graduates. He starts off with this.

    The debate over whether AI is taking people’s jobs may or may not last forever. If AI takes a lot of people’s jobs, the debate will end because one side will have clearly won. But if AI doesn’t take a lot of people’s jobs, then the debate will never be resolved, because there will be a bunch of people who will still go around saying that it’s about totake everyone’s job. Sometimes those people will find some subset of workers whose employment prospects are looking weaker than others, and claim that this is the beginning of the great AI job destruction wave. And who will be able to prove them wrong? 

    In other words, the good scenario for the labor market is that we continue to exist in a perpetual state of anxiety about whether or not we’re all about to be made obsolete by the next generation of robots and chatbots.

    Ha!

    If the good scenario is us being in perpetual anxiety, then I don’t want to imagine the bad scenario.

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  • Blur tool for photographs

    Ted Chiang’s post on The New Yorker about how ChatGPT—an LLMs in general—are the blurry JPEG of the web. This post is old and came out in Feb’23.

    When an image program is displaying a photo and has to reconstruct a pixel that was lost during the compression process, it looks at the nearby pixels and calculates the average. This is what ChatGPT does when it’s prompted to describe, say, losing a sock in the dryer using the style of the Declaration of Independence: it is taking two points in “lexical space” and generating the text that would occupy the location between them. (“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one to separate his garments from their mates, in order to maintain the cleanliness and order thereof. . . .”) ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it.

    Reminds me of Venkatesh Rao’s analogy on LLMs as index funds.

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  • Revenge of the English majors

    Quoting Stephan H. Wissel.

    LLMs with their dependency on well crafted prompts feels like the revenge of the English majors hurled towards computer science

    Ha!

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