Category: Food for thought

Ardem Patapoutian talking about proprioception in this interview where he discusses about his Nobel prize for medicine.

The simplest test is to close your eyes and touch your nose. If you think about how you’re able to tell where your fingers are with your eyes closed, you realize it’s because of how much your muscles are stretched. It’s the same sensor, Piezo 2, that senses this. You don’t feel that the muscle in your second finger is stretched, but rather you gather all the information, and your brain forms an image of where you are and what space you occupy. And that’s why, easily, without looking, you can walk, run, play soccer, play the violin. You can do all of this thanks to proprioception. And we take it for granted because you can’t turn it off. You can close your eyes and imagine what a blind person is like, but you can’t turn off proprioception. That’s why most people don’t know about it, because it’s always there. And it’s a big philosophical message: we take things for granted when we always have them.

A post from Better Than Random talking about how being useful and being valued are two different things.

Being useful means that you are good at getting things done in a specific area, so that people above you can delegate that completely. You are reliable, efficient, maybe even indispensable in the short term. But you are seen primarily as a gap-filler, someone who delivers on tasks that have to be done but are not necessarily a core component of the company strategy. “Take care of that and don’t screw up” is your mission, and the fewer headaches you create for your leadership chain, the bigger the rewards.

Being valued, on the other hand, means that you are brought into more conversations, not just to execute, but to help shape the direction. This comes with opportunities to grow and contribute in ways that are meaningful to you and the business.

It took me a few years to truly grasp the difference. If you’re valued, you’ll likely see a clear path for advancement and development, you might get more strategic roles and involvement in key decisions. If you are just useful, your role might feel more stagnant.

Jeet Mehta talking about how to keep on publishing even when you have single digit readers. His last suggestion is something he calls it, binge bank.

Your Binge Bank is the collection of content that your future fans will want to consume. It’s the rabbit hole of content they’ll go down. Your audience might not exist now, but when it does in the future (and you can bet it will), they’ll want to go back in time and see everything you’ve produced.

This is why YouTubers with millions of followers have hundreds of thousands of views on their first few videos. Those videos didn’t get any views when they were first published. They were revisited after they became famous, by their most loyal fans.

Saw this on Hacker News. The discussion on it is also worth reading.

Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.

Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.

Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about “meritocracy” and the salutary effects of hard work.

Poor kids aren’t visiting the carnival. They’re the ones working it.

Life isn’t fair. But then, each one of us have our own unfair advantage. We just don’t compare our unfair advantage.

From PDF to Text, a challenging problem by Marginalia.

Extracting text information from PDFs is a significantly bigger challenge than it might seem. The crux of the problem is that the file format isn’t a text format at all, but a graphical format.

It doesn’t have text in the way you might think of it, but more of a mapping of glyphs to coordinates on “paper”. These glyphs may be rotated, overlap, and appear out of order, with very little semantic information attached to them.

You should probably be in awe at the fact that you can open a PDF file in your favorite viewer (or browser), hit ctrl+f, and search for text.

Today I learned, text in PDF is just mapping of glyphs to coordinates on “paper”.

Shani Zhang sharing 21 observations from observing people. My favourite:

It is easy to tell how happy someone is to see another person enter a conversation. There is happy, and there is polite, and they look very different. Polite has a mechanical quality to it, like carrying out all the right movements to replace batteries in a remote. Happy has a boundless quality: unpredictable, even when it is at a low level. There is an openness, allowing another person to surprise and delight them. The easiest way to say this: there is no script for happy. It tumbles out of the body. Polite comes from the mind –it is restrained and calculated – measured lines and pauses. There are reinforcing loops in a polite person and a happy person. A person closed to the possibility of delight finds less of it. A person open to it finds more.

Quoting Dror Poleg from his post Everything Not Forbidden Is Compulsory.

The constraints that held possible and likely together are collapsing. Now, many more combinations are not just possible, they happen all the time. A programmer launching an app in San Francisco is likely to reach only a handful of customers, but she might reach a billion of them. An office worker sneezing in Wuhan will likely infect only a few colleagues, but he might infect people on five continents within weeks. A mortgage-backed securities trader on Wall Street is likely to ruin his life, but he might spark a global financial crisis. A factory worker uploading a lip-synching video to TikTok will likely be seen by a handful of people, but he might reach hundreds of millions, catapulting a 50-year-old song to the Billboard 100. 

What changed? We no longer live in an industrial, linear economy constrained by physical space and time. Our nonlinear economy is dominated by software and stories and biological formulas that spread across elaborate networks with limited friction. 

This is not just a world of new winners or new knowledge, but a world that redefines what it means to know and what it means to win. Every victory is ephemeral, every insight is contingent and limited. As soon as something is known, it will be exploited until the knowledge becomes useless. In the past, our knowledge accumulated, and our actions were limited. Now, it is exactly the opposite: Our actions can achieve unlimited outcomes, but knowledge decays rapidly.

I love using RSS. And I would recommend others to also use it. Thats why I have a message the bottom of all my posts on how to use RSS.

David Oliver talks about similar motivations as mine but brings up an important point on how creating your RSS feeds aggregator is a skill.

We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and subscribing to their feed, and then we find out who they trust and subscribe to their feed, and so on. Part of the judgement that we’re looking for in these trustees is not simply whether or not content is accurate but whether or not it is worth our attention. Over time, we can curate our little garden of content, make it diverse, and eliminate unnecessary noise. But, much like a real garden, pruning and weeding is essential and intentional. So, using an RSS reader is more than having a nice aggregator: It’s a skill and a routine. And that’s also where the magic lies because it’s that very process of engaging with content and deciding whether or not it has value to you that makes using an RSS reader a better experience and one where you own your attention.

This—unfortunately—is going to keep a lot of people away from RSS. The algorithmic aggregator that social media companies offer are just good enough for a lot of folks to invest in the skill of using RSS.

Benj Edwards writing for Ars Technica presents an intriguing analogy, comparing creativity to a finite natural resource like forests and explaining how early AI models could have a long lasting effect on creativity and its ultimate destruction. 

Today, the AI industry’s business models unintentionally echo the ways in which early industrialists approached forests and fisheries—as free inputs to exploit without considering ecological limits.

Just as pollution from early factories unexpectedly damaged the environment, AI systems risk polluting the digital environment by flooding the Internet with synthetic content. Like a forest that needs careful management to thrive or a fishery vulnerable to collapse from overexploitation, the creative ecosystem can be degraded even if the potential for imagination remains.

Depleting our creative diversity may become one of the hidden costs of AI, but that diversity is worth preserving. If we let AI systems deplete or pollute the human outputs they depend on, what happens to AI models—and ultimately to human society—over the long term?

Joe Wiggins explaining how diversification affects risk.

Although diversification is by no means a free lunch, it is an effective means of reducing and controlling risk, if done prudently. It works because by combining securities and assets with different future potential return paths it significantly constrains the range of outcomes of the combined portfolio.

If we move from a single stock holding to a diversified 50 stock portfolio we greatly lower the potential to make 10x our money, but also (nearly) entirely remove the risk of losing everything.

Diversification is a tool whereby we can (very imperfectly) create a portfolio with a range of potential outcomes that we are comfortable with. When individuals complain about over-diversification, what they typically mean is that the range of outcomes has been narrowed so that average outcomes are very likely. There is, however, no right or wrong level, it simply depends on our tolerance for risk. Or, to put it another way, our appetite for extremely good or extremely bad results.