Notes RSS feed

• Tragedy of life

  08/22/24, 12:00 AM

  Have you forgotten what you are really trying to do here? Step upon motonic step on the hedonic treadmill. But, for what? Shatter the status quo, keep only what works.

  the tragedy of life — is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid

  …to put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise…we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES…The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important.

  …no one HAS to do something he doesn’t want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that’s what you wind up doing, by all means convince yourself that you HAD to do it. You’ll have lots of company.

  — Hunter S. Thompson

• Convert Pain to Power

  08/21/24, 12:00 AM

  Pain indicates opportunity, if decoded results in power, else results in misery.

  They say “knowledge is power”. If pain is information, then pain can be converted to power.

  — Pain is information, Steph Ango

  The real test of knowledge is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us.

  — Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari

• Matter

  08/21/24, 12:00 AM

  The world presents itself as a mirage - of chaos. If you can see through it, and face reality as it is, you’ll start mattering.

  The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world, and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

  — Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

• Adapt

  08/19/24, 12:00 AM

  Hard work is important, but sometimes it just keeps you stuck, like running in place. Explore your limits, when progress stalls that’s your sign to change direction — think bigger, shift your approach. Don’t just keep grinding; adjust and find a better way forward.

  It’s hard to embrace risks that lead to growth when you’ve been stuck so long in survival mode.

  — Impromptu, Reid Hoffman

  invisible asymptote: ceiling that your growth curve would bump its head against by continuing down current path

  Longer this goes unrecognized, the longer you’ll be stuck in a Red Queen loop of your own making

  staying in the same place is falling behind

  — Invisible asymptotes, Eugene Wei

• Beware when machines do our thinking

  08/18/24, 12:00 AM

  Technology continues to allow us to exploit speed by trading off knowledge. This will either allow us to reach escape velocity or wilt in ignorance.

  AI may either accelerate wealth consolidation by concentrating power in the hands of a few, or democratize opportunity by reducing barriers to entry and operational costs, fostering entrepreneurship, in turn increasing competition and opening niche markets.

  Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope they would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

  — Dune, Frank Herbert

  doomsday scenario is … A.I.-supercharged corporations destroying the environment and the working class in their pursuit of shareholder value. Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off, and the most successful weapon in its arsenal has been its campaign to prevent us from considering any alternatives.

  — Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?, Ted Chiang

• Tacit knowledge overlayed with ego

  08/18/24, 12:00 AM

  Frameworks, proxy metrics, business and technical jargon - all mostly masks for tacit knowledge overlayed with ego.

  we need to accept the assymetry in knowledge; there are situations in which using statistics and econometrics can be useful. But I do not want my life to depend on it.

  — Incerto 5-Book Bundle, Nicholas Taleb\

• Mysteries remain in our understanding of human history

  08/13/24, 12:00 AM

  For most of our history on this planet, Homo sapiens have not been the only humans. We coexisted, and as our genes make clear frequently interbred with various hominin species, including some we haven’t yet identified. But they dropped off, one by one, leaving our own species to represent all humanity. On an evolutionary timescale, some of these species vanished only recently.

  — An Evolutionary Timeline of Homo Sapiens, Brian Handwerk

• Avoid hyperbolic discounting

  08/13/24, 12:00 AM

  Hyperbolic discounting makes us favor the now, but compounding teaches us that exponential growth is driven by time. Long-term focus turns small, consistent efforts into outsized rewards.

• Are we are not communicating or thinking?

  08/12/24, 12:00 AM

  Common LLM uses:

  • Generating verbose text to defer writing
  • Summarizing verbose text to defer reading

  Both hint at a shared struggle with communication, a desire to avoid deep thinking, or both.

• Strategy

  08/12/24, 12:00 AM

  Strategy answers what you aren’t going to do, roadmaps answer what you are going to do