The main goal of the adaptive abstractor is to determine a suitable state abstraction based on the learnt communication protocol, which reduces the size of the state space to be explored (the semantic problem), which in turn helps the agents achieve their goal, without much degradation in the policy performance (the effectiveness problem). Unlike [1], the proposed approach does not assume any prior knowledge of an expert policy to learn the abstraction. Moreover, the size of the abstracted space is not determined a priori.

this quote from "Ender's game" explains this best. Ender says "In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him."

"Writing is nature's way of telling you how sloppy your thinking is."

Research papers in the areas of computer science I work in are generally written by one of three groups. First, researchers at universities, including professors, post docs, and graduate students. These are people who’s job it is to do research. They have a lot of freedom to explore quite broadly, and do foundational and theoretical work. Second, engineering teams at companies publish their work. Amazon’s Dynamo, Firecracker, Aurora and Physalia papers are examples. Here, work is typically more directly aimed at a problem to be solved in a particular context. The strength of industry research is that it’s often been proven in the real world, at scale. In the middle are industrial research labs. Bell Labs was home to some of the foundational work in computing and communications. Microsoft Research do a great deal of impressive work. Industry labs, as a broad generalization, also tend to focus on concrete problems, but can operate over longer time horizons.

To generate an image caption with deep learning, we start the caption with a “start” token and generate one word at a time. We predict the next caption word based on the last predicted word and the image: next word=f(image,last word)

+ 24 hours in a day— 8 hours of sleeping = 16 hours left— 1.5 hours of showering, cleaning up, coffee = 14.5 hours left— 4 hours of managing contractors, firefighting and fixing bugs = 10.5 hours left— 1 hours of groceries or errands = 9.5 hours left— 1.5 hours of gym or going for a walk = 8 hours left— 1.5 hours of staying in touch with friends/family = 6.5 hours left— 1.5 hours of cooking and eating = 5 hours left— 4 hours of deep work, building new features/products = 1 hours left— 1 hours of sex/hugs/love = 0 hours left

Modern scientific research is a team sport, with groups spanning many universities and countries. Groups working without face-to-face interaction have historically been less innovative, according to a new paper on remote work in science. For decades, teams split among several countries were five times less likely to produce “breakthrough” science that replaced the corpus of research that came before it. But in the past decade, the innovation gap between on-site and remote teams suddenly reversed. Today, the teams divided by the greatest distance are producing the most significant and innovative work.

How Oliur Made $600,000 with Tumblr Themes - Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

Zola is a static site generator (SSG), similar to Hugo, Pelican, and Jekyll (for a comprehensive list of SSGs, please see Jamstack)

“Go past four large paulownia trees, turn left at the fifth tree, and turn right after passing seven maple trees. Do you remember?”   “Yes, yes.”   Valletta nodded at him with a puzzled expression.   She had long forgotten that she was being held in his arms   Looking at Valletta who was anxiously memorizing the location, Carlon Delphine murmured to himself.   ‘Is this how it should be done?’   Not giving them time to think was the way to make them act more child-like. The inside of his mouth was bitter.

As it turns out, a lack of discipline or motivation is not to blame for a short attention span. According to most studies, the average adult has a maximum attention span of about 20 minutes. While individuals can choose to re-focus their attention on the same activity repeatedly, it’s normal for lapses in attention to occur. In one study, students self-reported lapses in attention, describing the duration of lapses and documenting their frequency. While it’s possible students’ desire to perform well in the study influenced them to underestimate the length of each lapse, a clear pattern emerged. Students experienced lapses in attention up to 5 minutes in length, but shorter lapses were the most common. Lapses increased in frequency and duration as the course went on, clearly indicating that course length influenced overall focus levels. This study and others like it demonstrate what educators have known for years: even the best of students have a limited attention span, and for the best learning outcomes we must learn to work with it.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics: The world tends towards disorder. That’s why your room becomes messier and messier over time. It’s also why an engine converts only ~35% of its energy into useful work. Time moves towards increasing one direction: increasing entropy. 

Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available. People don’t want to look like they’re lazy, so they find extra tasks to tackle, even if they’re trivial. If you have six months to complete a project, it will take six months to complete. Set deadlines accordingly.  

Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. One hospital took too long to admit patients so a penalty was given for 4+ hour wait times. In response, ambulance drivers were asked to slow down so they could shorten wait times. 

Table Selection: This idea comes from poker, where you’re advised to choose your opponents carefully. That means you shouldn’t compete against the best people. You don’t need to get good at doing difficult things if you get good at avoiding difficult things. If you want to win, pick an easy table and nail your execution.

Planck’s Principle: Science doesn’t progress because people change their views. Rather, each new generation of scientists has different views. As old generations pass away, new ideas are accepted and the scientific consensus changes.

Overton Window: You can control thought without limiting speech. You can do it by defining the limits of acceptable thought while allowing for lively debate within these barriers. For example, Fox News and MSNBC set limits on what political thoughts they consider acceptable, but in the grand scheme of things, they’re both fairly conventional. The political spectrum stretches far beyond the ideas they entertain, but ideas outside their limits are shunned. 

Law of Shitty Click-Through Rates: Most marketing strategies have a short window of success, as click-through rates decrease as tactics mature. For example, the first banner-ad has a click-through rate of more than 70%. Now we avoid them with ad-blockers.

The Never-Ending Now: The structure of our social media feeds blinds us to history, as it causes us to live in an endless cycle of ephemeral content consumption. The structure of the Internet pulls people away from age-old wisdom

Look for Things That Don’t Make Sense: The world always makes sense. But it can be confusing. When it is, your model of the world is wrong. So, things that don’t make sense are a learning opportunity

Competition is for Losers: Avoid competition. Stop copying what everybody else is doing. If you work at a for-profit company, work on problems that would not otherwise be solved. If you’re at a non-profit, fix unpopular problems. Life is easier when you don’t compete. (Hint: don’t start another bottled water company). 

Talent vs. Genius: Society is good at training talent but terrible at cultivating genius. Talented people are good at hitting targets others can’t hit, but geniuses find targets others can’t see. They are opposite modes of excellence. Talent is predictable, genius is unpredictable. 

Mimetic Theory of Conflict: People who are similar are more likely to fight than people who are different. That’s why Civil Wars and family feuds create the worst conflicts. The closer two people are and the more equality between them, the greater the potential for conflict.

Faustian Bargain: A man once sold his soul to a demon in exchange for knowledge. At first, it seemed like a smart trade. But the man lost in the long-run. Tragically, what the man lost was more valuable than what he earned. In short, he won the battle but lost the war. 

My dad walked out when I was a kid, mum's got so many mental health problems it was safer for me to be in care than with her.” Which Shen Jiu knew from his own research in how to get away from the Dursleys was quite rare, even these days the system preferred to keep the child with its mother, believing somehow that it was better than with the father or with the system itself.

The Queen was the most powerful piece in the set, the one who could cross the board as she pleased, it was also one of the pieces that a pawn could be upgraded to. A Queen was second only to a King, but it was the one with the most freedom. Rather like himself and Yue Qi. So it was the Queen he chose.

He would be taking part in the chess tournament that Ron and Percy Weasley had arranged, and if he didn't take first place he would be highly disappointed in himself.Hermione did join them, she even signed up to the tournament – even though she was actually terrible at chess. He had to hide a smile behind a sleeve. She was – painfully earnest and kind of adorable with that gung ho attitude.

glanced at Hermione who was scowling down at her knees, wet eyed and furious. He remembered her words from the day after the troll incident, that no one had even realised she was missing, and they hadn't cared when she came back so obviously upset. He then looked back at the quidditch match and saw her year-mates in one of the stands opposite going crazy, cheering and jumping up and down.They cared more about this game than her life.He sighed quietly through his nose. Children were cruel. They would always be cruel, no matter what world they happened to be in, because children were all inherently selfish little beasts who would sell you out for a crust of bread if given the opportunity.He shouldn't.She would just betray him the same way Ning Yingying did. The way Liu-shizhi did.[ (๑◕︵◕๑) Host can't think like that forever, or Host will never be happy, never trust, never love. It takes much bravery System knows, especially when one has been betrayed as much as Host has. But don't let the past steal your future Host!! ヽ(≧Д≦)ノ ]Had he still been in his old body, had he still been on Qing Jing Peak, he would have brushed those words away as so much noise, like dust on his shoulder. What would the System know of it? What could anyone know of his pain or his suffering? But right now, Shen Jiu was looking at the world with fresh eyes and a child's mind and he found himself hesitating to just throw the words away like he had many similar sentiments.He rolled them around thoughtfully.'Don't let the past steal your future', huh? A strange sentiment but he couldn't find a fault with it. Truly the past shaped the future, it guided it, but all it did was open doors. It was the walker who chose which ones to go through, which ones to travel to. He looked around himself at the cheering children, at the flying game, at Hermione's hand in his own as she sniffled and tried to dry her tears without him or anyone else noticing. At Su Li who turned to grin at him wildly, pointing to the Gryffindor chasers and asking if he'd seen that! He nodded silently, and she turned her attention back to the match with bright eyed enthusiasm. He looked out at the game, and watched as a Slytherin made the conscious choice to grab a girl by the head instead of the ball in her hands, and nearly twist her head off as they flew at break neck speeds.He chose that.Over a game.Shen Jiu tilted his head at the minor penalty assigned to him, as the girl in question grimaced and cracked her neck and had to go down for medical attention.The rivalry between Gryffindor and Slytherin was generations long, since the founding of the school, since Slytherin himself was driven from the halls for threatening the students. But as they say, victory is written by the victors. It had been over a thousand years, who was left to say otherwise? Who knew the truth, really?But it was a conscious choice made by the students to continue it, from their parents to their children, to their childrens' children. They chose to let their past poison their future. To the point where little girls nearly had their neck's snapped in school games. All because of the colour of their ties. Or the blood in their veins.Shen Jiu swallowed and tightened his grip on Hermione's hand as he realised that he had allowed his past to control his future, that he had allowed Qiu Jianluo to puppet him from his nightmares into his present. He had treated Ning Yingying as he had seen Qiu Jianluo treat Haitang, because he had no other frame of reference on how you treated a treasured female family member. He treated Ming Fan the same way, no, he treated Ming Fan the way he had seen Sect Leader treat Yue Qingyuan – not the way his own Shizun had treated him. Because he knew even then his Shizun hated him, and for all that Ming Fan was incapable of thinking the majority of his actions through, he was a teenager, and he would grow out of that eventually. Luo Binghe.... He treated the little beast no differently than any other student on his peak. If Ming Fan had been at the heart of so many fights, he would have forced the boy to kneel and accept the beatings his martial siblings bestowed upon him, perhaps he would stop picking them if he knew that they would be beating him for it later. If Ning Yingying had been caught stealing he would have made her cut her own bamboo and striped her back bloody with it personally, regardless of if it was food from the kitchens or not. Food taken without permission into your own mouth was food taken out of the mouths of your martial siblings, and unacceptable. If either of them had opted to skip their cultivation lessons in favour of whatever the hell it was that Luo Binghe thought was so much more important, then they too would have their chore list increased.But he was – clearer minded now.He – could look back and see that there had been things amiss that he had not noticed the first time.Luo Binghe reminded him of himself when he first came to Qing Jing, only better at hiding his darkness. Ning Yingying took one look at those starry eyes and immediately thought him a puppy, the same way Qiu Haitang took a look at him and decided she'd found herself a cute fluffy cat. But while Shen Jiu had never even tried to pretend to be anything but what he was, Luo Binghe was a wolf in sheep's clothing, sniffing around his Shijie's skirts repulsively instead of minding his cultivation.He slept in the woodshed, which was fine, Shen Jiu had slept in there as a Disciple rather than go into the dormitories as well – it had never occurred to him that it hadn't been by choice, not until it was listed as one of the boy's many grievances against him in that sham trial of Huan Hua's. So his martial siblings must have forced him out. Which... all those fights Luo Binghe found himself in, were they truly fights he had instigated? What of the strangely bitter tea that the child first presented to him? Ming fan knew how he preferred his tea, knew he was sensitive to any unusual tastes, knew he would react poorly to any attempt to drug him –Shen Jiu bit his lower lip.Had Ming Fan lied to him? His head disciple? Had his head disciple lied to him? The one young man, the one student, he allowed into his home, trusted to prepare his food and tea? Have access to his personal seal? He swallowed, suddenly chilled. What had that stupid little boy done in Shen Jiu's name?The match ended in Slytherin's victory when the Beaters smashed the Gryffindor Seeker off his broom and into the stands, giving their own Seeker time to leisurely scoop the ball out of the air as though he were plucking a flower from a field.

I experienced this deceptive build quality firsthand. This Brooklyn apartment had all the fancy appliances: a WiFi connected security system, doors that I could unlock with my phone, and a Nest thermostat that used artificial intelligence to predict my desired temperature. Futuristic, I know. Even better, I was the first tenant to ever live in the building. As sexy as that sounded when I moved in, I regretted that decision by the time I moved out. For the sake of this essay, let’s focus on just the bathroom. During my first winter in the apartment, part of the ceiling turned into a polka-dotted blue and green mold, which implied some kind of spooky situation that I was too intimidated to resolve. The tiles on my bathroom floor were cut so lazily that I could see the coarse-grained plaster underneath. The shower was even worse. Whenever I turned the water on, I had to stand in the corner and shrivel my body like a raisin because 90% of the faucet angles caused the water to leak through a small crevice between the door of the shower and the glass around it. Though I happily made sacrifices to afford New York rent, this bathroom went a step too far. But thankfully, I’m as graceful as an Olympic gymnast. Had it not been for my supple dexterity, I would have had to choose between keeping my body clean and the floor dry. Oh, and I swear. I must have contacted the building management with a new problem every two weeks. Not to mention the aesthetics. On the shower floor itself, contractors who almost certainly won the job because they bid the lowest price had left a white Sharpie mark that said “Tile #248.” It was as if the construction workers stole it off the sample shelf at Home Depot and walked out the front door with it. Looking back, the quality of that bathroom was the equivalent of a student’s rough draft being handed to the teacher instead of a final paper. The general ideas were there, but nobody bothered to check for spelling or punctuation.

If architecture could be a cliche, my friend’s home would be it. If he’s proud of his home, it’s because he’s proud of all the money he made to buy it, and not because of the sweat he exhausted to make it a meaningful place. That’s why his McMansion has the same Koehler faucets, the same Bed, Bath & Beyond light fixtures, the same Schlage door knobs that beep like a truck in reverse whenever you try to open them, the same flimsy cabinets, and the same paper thin doors that tempt me to run through them like Harry Potter and the 9 ¾ platform. 

A peculiar part of the Microwave Economy is that wealthy people aren’t immune to it. Escaping the Microwave Economy has little to do with money.

the limitations of Google’s definition show how we drain the world of texture when we strip out the subtleties.   I see a parallel in recorded music. When the original Phonograph cylinders were invented in the late 1800s, they were the earliest commercial way to record and reproduce sound. People could play music wherever they wanted for the first time. The LPs that followed them didn’t have the depth of 45s or 78s, but they stuck around because they were easier to maintain. Music has since moved away from cassettes, CDs and now MP3 recordings which reduce file sizes by stripping away 75-95 percent of the original audio — the parts that are theoretically beyond people’s hearing capabilities. Reflecting on this trend towards convenience, the musician David Byrne wrote: “It’s music in pill form, it delivers vitamins, it does the job, but something is missing. We are often offered, and gladly accept, convenient mediums that are ‘good enough’ rather than ones that are actually better.” Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for the convenience offered by efficiency gains, and I still remember how magical it felt to hold my blue 4GB iPod mini in the 5th grade, knowing that it could play 1,000 different songs. It’s the second order effects that concern me. One study found that in the past 50 years, musicians have restricted their pitch sequences and reduced the variety in pitch progressions. During that same time period, the majority of pop music has embraced the same 4/4 beat structure — meaning where there are four beats per bar and every new bar begins at a count of the first beat. It’s stuck because it’s the easiest signature to compose a song around. Fast and simple, just like the microwave. One writer called it “the largest scale homogenization of music in history.”

This urge to microwavify the world isn’t limited to the food industry. In Technics and Civilization, the historian Lewis Mumford writes that our industrial mode of thinking has caused us to devalue the kind of intuitive knowledge that leads to beauty. He writes: “The qualitative was reduced to the subjective: the subjective was dismissed as unreal, and the unseen and unmeasurable non-existent… art, poetry, organic rhythm, fantasy — was deliberately eliminated.”  As Mumford observed almost a century ago, the world loses its soul when we place too much weight on the ideal of total quantification. By doing so, we stop valuing what we know to be true, but can’t articulate. Rituals lose their significance, possessions lose their meaning, and things are valued only for their apparent utility. To resist the totalizing, but ultimately short-sighted fingers of quantification, many cultures invented words to describe things that exist but can’t be defined. Chinese architecture follows the philosophy of Feng Shui, which describes the invisible — but very real — forces that bind the earth, the universe, and humanity together. Taoist philosophy understands “the thing that cannot be grasped” as a concept that can be internalized only through the actual experience of living.1 Moving westward, the French novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” And in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig describes how quality can’t be defined empirically because it transcends the limits of language. He insists that quality can only be explained with analogies, summarizing his ideas as such: “When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.” All these examples use different words to capture the same idea.

“Would it matter to Xiao'Xing if your Shen'shishu really did frequent brothels?” he asked slowly.Xiao'Xing gave his hair a sharp tug, “What is wrong about paying to spend time with the aunties and sisters?” he asked shortly, “No. Shen'shishu has a sharp tongue but he is gentle. He wouldn't hurt them. And it is better to pay them for a service than to sweet-talk some innocent star-struck farm girl into your bed and then leave her with the broken remnants of her dignity and a furious family the next day.”“Err...”“It happens a lot,” Xiao'Xing informed him knowingly, and tiredly. “Cultivators speak poorly of prostitutes an awful lot but somehow think it more romantic or honourable to bed a girl who will suffer the consequences of their actions afterwards. Several of the girls at a'Niang's brothel were thrown out after their parents found out they had relations with a cultivator or a noble who stopped by briefly. Since they wished to be 'whores' then they could earn the roof over their heads like one.” The child heaved a world weary sigh against Yue Qingyuan's shoulder, the Sect Leader sat frozen in discomfort and dismay as he realised that.... he could not exactly disagree. “Cultivators can be so two faced some times. What is so wrong about paying a lady for her time? It is better than forcing her into a loveless marriage, and it means she can take care of herself and her needs and any children she might have. If they truly hated it so much then they need to start making it so ladies can work and earn their own money and keep their own houses and maintain their own estates.”

Pointing out sins doesn’t make you closer to God. Even if those sins existed, which they don’t,” he scoffed as he went back to writing his notes aggressively. If Shen’shishu had a child he would absolutely take responsibility for that child immediately.

red line is searching linearly, one page at a time; the yellow line is searching two pages at a time; and the green line is dividing and conquering, starting in the middle and dividing the problem in half each time.

our purpose for learning a new programming language and other tools is to solve problems. And we solve those problems by creating some output from input:

This may seem obvious, but it’s not until it actual happens to you that you internalise it as a truth. Until then it can seem like a fairytale, or something that just happens to other people

The Internet gives us the power to invert that frame. Our words and ideas can work for us while we’re spending time with friends and family, adventuring or working on other things. As long as we have a system to capture the value that our published words create for us, we increase our capacity to connect with other people (for that’s all words do). We give ourselves leverage

“Well, I’m king, aren’t I? Can’t I find peace in my own castle?” Robert asks, running a hand down his face. “I thought it was all feasts and parties and a little ruling. Why in the seven hells is the High Septon bothering me about some quarrel between the septons? Even Jon is on my ass about this coronation and the upcoming wedding, one I didn’t even ask for!”Robert stops using his inside voice towards the end of that last bit.“It’s fair to be frustrated,” Eleanor says, closing her eyes again and letting out a breath. “It’s a lot of responsibilities that you didn’t even want. And it seems its coming from all sides. Both family, and from everyone else.”She can certainly relate, though most of her responsibilities are all her own doing. If she wanted she could grow fat and happy in Maidenpool not giving a damn about anything or anyone else.But what’s the point in a second life if she doesn’t feel satisfied with what she’s completed in that time?“No one bloody listens to me,” Robert says. “They’re all lost in their damned plans. Ones I didn’t ask to be apart of. I’m King, and yet I feel-” Robert breaks off into a frustrated grunt. Emotions are very hard to express sometimes she gets the gist.“I understand.” It’s important for him to get verbal affirmation like that. “I feel like you feel that you’ve lost control of your life.”“Exactly!” Robert says. “What makes you feel in control?” Eleanor asks.Silence. Very deep thinking, probably. She hears the couch move and footsteps start pacing back and forth.Steps pause.“Fighting,” Robert says firmly.Makes sense. Blooded frat boys do like getting into fights.Er, so do acclaimed military commanders and warriors. Which he is.“Set a part of your day everyday to train, spar with other men. Hell, start training some of the guards,” Eleanor opens her eyes and looks into his stormy grey ones, a few feet away. “You’re stuck doing a lot of stuff you don’t feel like you’re good at. Focus on doing the things you like doing when it's not responsibility time.”“Doesn’t change that I’ll be in a hundred Small Council meetings,” Robert says, scratching his beard.“You and me both, Baratheon, you and me both,” Eleanor sighs. “We can’t make all our lives just what we enjoy. Humans aren’t made to have no stakes.”The ultra rich back on earth had issues with depression because they literally had no problems or responsibilities. Unfortunately, sometimes you need to be under a little chosen stress to feel alive and worth while.Or at least that’s how she thinks about it. She’s still pro everyone having their needs met. People just need to pick their purpose and stick to it. But what does she know? She’s old. And there’s so many different ideas for how you’re meant to live she’d be a fool to discount them all in favor of her personal way of life.

His findings showed that sit-ups and crunches weren’t just mediocre strength-building moves; they were actually hurting lots of people. “If you bend the spine forward over and over again when not under load, not much happens to the spine,” McGill told me. He gave the example of belly dancers, whose movements he has studied: They flex their spines repetitively without high incidence of injury. “The problem occurs when you flex over and over again with load from higher muscle activation or external objects held in the hands.”

If you’ve ever been told to lift with your legs, this is why. When a person’s spine curves and strains in order to move weight through space—like when a bunch of third graders flail through a set of sit-ups—the movement stresses their spinal disks. The more often you ask your spine to flex in those circumstances, the riskier it is. This is how people who spend their working lives moving inventory around a warehouse or stacking bushels of produce onto trucks end up with back pain later in life, even if they can’t point to any acute back injuries suffered along the way. McGill found that the most reliable way to avoid this kind of chronic problem is to brace your core when you pick up something heavy. That means tensing key muscles in order to protect your spine’s structural integrity, and to help shift the effort to your hips and legs. Not coincidentally, weight lifters follow this advice when they safely execute a dead lift. Perfect form is not always possible for workers dealing with irregular loads and crowded spaces, but intentional exercise is all about form. Getting it right and activating the intended muscles is the whole point.

there are only two types of questions that I will track in Roam. Let's create a block for each of them. The two blocks should read "Open Questions" and "Answered Questions."

approaching it iteratively by building as you learn. You will be much better off than if you tried to tackle everything all at once.