151 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2023
    1. both of which impress people

      xD

    2. But any energy that goes into how you seem comes out of being good. That's one reason nerds have an advantage in doing great work: they expend little effort on seeming anything. In fact that's basically the definition of a nerd.

      Ha!

    3. make something that people will care about in a hundred years

      Wow. Logical yardstick, though.

    4. being good is simply too vague a standard

      Reasonable diagnosis.

    5. The perfect setup is an office you work in and that you walk to and from.

      1-minute-close is too close - perhaps 10-20min close is ideal?

    6. When you're procrastinating in units of years

      Jeez.

    7. lot not done

      Of the orders of magnitude of not done, a lot is a lot.

    8. Per-project procrastination is far the more dangerous

      New idea.

    9. [7]

      Strong recommendation in footnote - go see.

    10. Try to finish what you start

      Important advice put gently.

    11. I often trick myself by saying "I'll just read over what I've got so far." Five minutes later I've found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, and I'm off.

      Haha!

    12. technique to working,

      Reflect.

    13. You don't just put out your sail and get blown forward by inspiration.

      Indeed xD

    14. The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance.

      Reflect.

    15. So it does take a good deal of boldness.

      Believable.

    16. One sign that you're suited for some kind of work is when you like even the parts that other people find tedious or frightening.

      A heuristic to reflect on.

    17. scrambling diagonally across tracks

      Sick metaphor.

    18. assumption that you'll somehow magically guess as a teenager

      Can confirm.

    19. The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive.

      Anyone care to debate this?

    20. [2]

      Amusing footnote.

    21. Which may help explain why people's reaction to a new idea is often the first half of laughing: Ha!

      Amusing observation.

    22. What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people?

      Worth thinking seriously about.

    23. Whatever seems to you excitingly ambitious.

      For exciting is necessary for sustained effort, and the effort's relevance will improve with time.

    24. Some kinds of work you end up doing may not even exist yet.

      Encouraging.

    25. [1]

      Good footnote.

    26. Doing great work means doing something important so well that you expand people's ideas of what's possible

      Ideological influence as a hallmark of great work.

    27. July 2023

      first

    1. But you should always be aiming as close to the center as you can without stallin

      Aim at the center!

    2. And if you think there's something admirable about working too hard, get that idea out of your head. You're not merely getting worse results, but getting them because you're showing off — if not to other people, then to yourself

      Key point.

    3. If great talent and great drive are both rare, then people with both are rare squared.

      Such rare!

    4. I wasn't sure of that as a kid. Schoolwork varied in difficulty; one didn't always have to work super hard to do well.

      Good explanation

  2. Apr 2023
  3. Jun 2022
    1. where you can have a very high impact with little work. You want high leverage.

      [[paul graham]]

  4. May 2022
    1. Charlie, however, just takes a sip of coconut water, and says “There’s a bug over there because you re-used lastCachedTime. Otherwise, looks good. Ship it!”

      big lmao

    1. They're as unhappy on the territory of humor as a mounted knight on a skating rink.

      amazing [[analogy]].

    1. Those kind of people reject conventional ideas only to replace them with the most random conspiracy theories.

      [[!]]

    1. Computers would be just as happy to be told what to do directly in machine language.

      not untrue

    1. But programming languages are different: programming languages are not just technology, but what programmers think in.

      interesting view on competitive advantage.

  5. Apr 2022
    1. Life becomes a little richer because you pay more attention.

      !

    2. you start to look out for things that make you think, challenge your assumptions, or inspire you.

      [[good ideas]]

    1. My spelling at school was terrible, and that psychologically stopped me from learning to write well.

      humble and courageous

    2. I wasted a lot of this content, doing little or nothing with the ideas I found.

      relatable

    1. I studied entrepreneurship in college. I took business courses in areas like accounting, finance, marketing, lean startups, business scaling, etc. etc. I've read plenty of the books, "The Lean Startup", "Growth Hacking", "Traction", the list goes on. I've listened to thousands of hours of podcasts like Rob Wallings "Start Ups for the Rest of Us" or Sam Parr and Shaan Puri's "My First Million". I've watched YouTube videos for what feels like longer than I've actually been alive when it comes to building a business. I should know this like the back of my hand.

      relatable

    1. The non-transitioning items still jump around awkwardly — we can fix that in the next chapter.

      Anticipated and alleviated my exact concern. Svelte's creators have a keen eye for details! [[svelte]]

    2. defer transitions, so that they can be coordinated between multiple elements.

      [[svelte]]

    1. Note that the transition is reversible — if you toggle the checkbox while the transition is ongoing, it transitions from the current point, rather than the beginning or the end.

      🤯 [[svelte]]

    1. It feels much like Rust vs. C++. Rather than adding layers upon layers to existing infinitely backwards-compatible software, it takes the best patterns and features and builds them from the ground up. The result is a vastly simpler, faster, leaner, and easier to use stack that's still familiar to users of most popular modern tooling.

      [[svelte]] analogy to [[rust]] and C

    1. If it were true, you would never lose a game of chess (no new information is introduced)

      xD

    2. given the information available to you, you know all the conclusions that can be deduced from that information.

      [[efficient minds hypothesis]]

      Conclusions require more than the mere possession of information to be formed. Attention must be paid to recognise and acknowledge even the simplest of the exponentially numerous deductions available to an increasing number of facts.

  6. Mar 2022
  7. withorbit.com withorbit.com
    1. Orbit helps you deeply internalize ideas through periodic review.

      Testing [[annotations]]

  8. Feb 2022
    1. But if you were to actually make it part of your recurring lifestyle, the benefits would stop, and eventually the impact would work in reverse.

      thus consolidating the practice of waking at the same time each day, no matter what. As life's demands inevitably alter one's evening schedule, rising at the same time, regardless of getting 7-8 hours, may indeed be a great balancer to diminishing returns on early-rising. [[annotation]] [[get up early]]

    2. By waking up early you intentionally were fighting against your chronobiology, hence adding an element of acute sleep deprivation regardless of how many hours you got the night before. That mania fuels an amphetamine like focus.

      Relatable. There's just that 'something' feeling when rising substantially early.

    3. The beaming was at 10:00 a.m.; we were done at 9:00 a.m.

      Classic vibes [[max levchin]]

    4. meaning that clearance is not caused by sleep per se, but instead only co-occurrs with it.

      Also meaning that without anaesthesia, humans clear metabolites through sleep. Which would you opt for?

    5. They were too busy listening to his keynote at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society 2019 meeting.

      xD

    6. Walker falsified a graph from an academic study in the book.

      It just gets better.

      Didn't expect to find a circus in the Appendix.

    7. Walker wrote: “Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer”, despite there being no evidence that cancer in general and sleep are related. There are obviously no RCTs on this, and, in fact, there’s not even a correlation between general cancer risk and sleep duration.

      Big if true. If this is indeed an outright lie, then it's about time we all woke up.

    8. upstream cause that results in both undersleeping and lack of productivity.

      Very plausible. The Cult of Sleep, by default, accuses lack-of-sleep as the culprit of an ever-widening salad bar of life's ailments. Nothing requires less thought than blaming sleep, the unconscious, elusive abstract, for predicaments.

      Lack of productivity warrants more nuanced and bespoke investigation, though not excluding sleep!

    9. this is expected as per the analogy to exercise I make above.

      But this is a poor analogy. Is your lost productivity later reimbursed? If so, how might you explain the underlying catchup mechanism for cognitive performance?

      If it cannot be explained as simply as the relationship between exercise and strength i.e. muscle tear => muscle repair => muscle consolidation, the analogy has overreached.

    10. just a prospect of playing an exciting video game, makes me 100% alert even after sleeping for 2-3 hours.

      Can confirm. Now this is true science.

    11. Convincing a million 20-year-olds to sleep an unnecessary hour a day is equivalent, in terms of their hours of wakefulness, to killing 62,500 of them.

      Such sentences erode credibility; this kind of crude sabre-rattling is regrettably employed props up ideas have not the legs to stand alone.

    12. I used to be really scared of not sleeping enough and almost never set the alarm for less than 7.5 hours after going to bed.

      Quite relatable.

    13. people like Matthew Walker, and making me lose the last remnants of trust in sleep science that I had.

      Fair enough!

    14. It appears that there is a distinct single-point mutation that allows some people to sleep several hours less than typical on average.

      Fascinating. Perhaps an answer to [[patrick collison]]'s question on why some people need less sleep than others: https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/945846866444349440

    15. there’s nothing “natural” about sleeping 7-9 hours.

      Fair enough. "Natural" arguments typically represents a morals more than it does reason.

    16. get by

      Getting by on a solo sailing race requires a far narrower, albeit more refined, set of performant skills than getting by generally. For one, social skills are redundant.

      The minimum amount of sleep to achieve the fastest time in a race accommodates many painful tradeoffs that non-seafaring-speed-maximising humans would consider as not getting by.

    17. If you want a problem solved make it someone’s project. If you want it managed make it someone’s job.

      Good ol' Pat!

    18. sleepiness, rather absence of sleep

      That's like saying thirst, rather than the absence of water, is responsible for the decrease cognitive performance during dehydration.

      Yes, you could have slept 20 hours and still feel sleepy. Or not slept for 40 hours and not feel sleepy. Or have sleepiness/wakefulness artificially induced. But these are frivolous scenarios for discerning the relative impact of sleepiness and absence of sleep on cognitive performance.

    19. short-term acute stress response results in adaptation and in long-term increase in performance and in benefit to the organism.

      Perhaps so. Effort of all colours may produce short-term stress while producing obvious long-term benefits. After all, stress serves to keep us from harm.

      But even the modern human is, in all his comfort, susceptible to genuine harm. To repurpose the fundamental, time-tested purpose stress has served is to risk forgoing better explanations for the same phenomena you're ascribing to stress.

    20. The only thing we observe is that my organism was subjected to acute stress.

      Yet ignored are side effects that escaped observation. Sleep-related memory loss may have contributed to this emphatic conclusion.

    21. being overpowered by a superstimulus while being bored

      Fair point.

      Put Big Macs in front of me and I'll eat more Big Macs. Put a Playstation in front of me and I'll play more video games. Put a bed in front of me I'll sleep more. Not much more, but more than if it were not there.

    22. Does this sound “natural”

      If natural means 'as humans were in the Stone Age', then obviously not.

      If natural means 'as a human would behave in a given environment', then probably.

      A roof over your head, comfortable bed, mattress, duvets, pillows, and atmospheric regulation are not cheap - but it does seem human-like to value them as we do.

    1. The commitment to deliberate prac-tice distinguishes the expert performer from the vast majorityof children and adults who seem to have remarkable difficultymeeting the much lower demands on practice in schools, adulteducation, and in physical exercise programs

      Commitment to deliberate practice distinguishes the expert performer from the vast majority of children and adults who seem to have remarkable difficult meeting much lower demands on practice in schools, adult education etc. [[annotation]] [[deliberate practice]] [[peak performance]]

    1. sleep deprivation can cause odd mental states including mania and loss of inhibitions
    2. asymmetry

      Keen point. [[annotation]]

    3. which might also be reproduced in the morning

      Wow, yes! Should one rise at well before the time-bound arrival of typical stressors (commute/emails etc), one feels somewhat lighter. [[annotation]]

    4. the incubation effect

      Sigh, this will be another rabbit hole. Interesting! [[annotation]]

    5. “I had a busy day, I can take it easy tonight.”

      How many times have such justifications affected my decisions? Too many to count. Outcomes are in turn affected by these decisions, so soft rationalisations like these should be taken seriously (and avoided where possible). [[annotation]]

    6. use up some sort of ‘willpower’ or ‘creativity’

      Yes! One loses some mental capacity to the day job.

    7. obligations/​​excuses literally cannot come first.

      Yes, it's quite liberating. [[annotation]]

    8. repeatedly ‘accidentally’ find themselves with too little time to write at night

      Something stress-related typically negatively affects my night-time scheduling. [[annotation]]

    9. Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

      Interesting [[musings]] [[annotation]]

    10. disgustingly early like pre-dawn

      I feel you... [[annotation]]

    11. went for walks in the afternoon, played the gramophone in the evening.

      sounds like the good life [[annotations]]

    12. for the prose rhythms of 1611 were not those she was in search of

      xD

    13. 3–4 hr of writing every morning and to spend the rest of the day on walking, correspondence, napping, and other less demanding activities

      Like [[naval]] saying that the best investors spend most of their time walking and reading. https://twitter.com/naval/status/1490814057032519681 [[annotation]]

    1. ‘I don’t know where to put this.’

      Equivalent to saying "I don't know why I'm even noting this."

    1. devs (including me, sometimes) spend absurd amounts of time perfectly doing the wrong thing.

      Relatable.

    2. multiplier on everything else you do

      Damn.

    1. Expressions evaluate to a resulting value. Let’s look at some examples.

      [[rust]]

    2. Statements are instructions that perform some action and do not return a value
    1. Naming hardcoded values used throughout your program as constants is useful in conveying the meaning of that value to future maintainers of the code

      important

    1. collector’s fallacy

      Intrigued for a deeper dive it root cause.

    2. focus on finely honing a small handful of questions and ideas each day from your reading

      Good advice.

    3. Introductory Articles
    1. group-brainstorm

      xD

    2. Don't brainstorm, since brainstormed ideas are what's easily available, instead of innovative or actually relevant.

      Prescient.

    3. people with almost no time or money sometimes do things that don’t seem to make any sense... People facing deadlines sometimes switch frantically between all kinds of tasks. People with little money sometimes spend it on seeming luxuries like take-away food.

      Profound.

    1. that misrepresent the original intent of a video.

      Hear hear.

    2. music has been by written by Vince Rubinetti

      music for [[3Blue1Brown]] videos

    1. distortions of Ciceronian oratory were explicitly banned from the Royal Society

      Pretty severe move. Wonder what the consequences would have been.

    2. “to clothe and adorn the obscurity even of philosophy itself with sensible and plausible elocution.”

      Sensible advice, if not a little floridly put.

  9. Dec 2021
    1. post-scarcity levels

      A consequential achievement indeed.

    2. That anyone could consider this to be the computational backbone to the new global internet is beyond laughable.

      Right. While perhaps presumed benefits of privacy is exaggerated by the skittish.

    1. Usually they take the form of a list of links

      Yes! While impressive, it's overwhelming in practice.

  10. Nov 2021
    1. without any individual person needing to personally donate that capital

      Owing to consensus mechanisms for the allocation of capital?

    2. often at first gradually, then suddenly.

      Exponential?

    3. participation

      ?

    4. performance

      Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life

      Or high-performing sportsmen

    5. process

      Ah, the legal system.

    6. fairness

      The law?

    7. continuity

      Institutions?

    8. brute force

      Authoritarian states.

    9. coordination games

      Key to consider

    1. They hold logic related to the class, rather than to the instance of the class.

      [[static methods]] [[javascript]] [[classes]]

  11. Oct 2021
    1. Sinofsky is the author of Hardcore Software Inside the Rise and Fall of the PC Revolution, an immense online opus compiled with Benedictine patience and extensive archives. A great read for those who have lived inside the PC revolution, or want to gain a better appreciation for its unfolding.)

      [[sinofsky]]

    1. If you find yourself lost, remember to keep moving forward. It will all eventually make sense.

      OK!

  12. Sep 2021
    1. The problem is so widespread that people pretending to be eminent do it by pretending to be overstretched.

      Yep!

    2. Well, that may be fine advice for a bunch of goatherds in Bronze Age Palestine.

      xD

    3. more like manning a mental health hotline

      xD

    4. But in retrospect you're probably better off studying something moderately interesting with someone who's good at it than something very interesting with someone who isn't.

      Good point.

    5. Maybe I got a little carried away with this example.

      Definitely not! An engrossing example.

    6. the smart ones would refuse such a job, leaving only a few with the wrong sort of ambition

      xD

    7. or the painter who can't afford to heat his studio and thus has to wear a beret indoors.

      deadpan humour is funnier in writing

    1. you'll face a force more powerful than other people's skepticism: your own skepticism.

      One's own scepticism is often granted immunity against internal scrutiny. The agenda presented to my judges are biased by a fundamental presupposition: that I am no sceptic; but ambitious, optimistic, and rational. My self-awareness is my edge. LOL.

      Self-awareness, especially for so-called confident types, surely reveals more inadequacies than competencies.

    2. And that in turn proves that dismissing new ideas is not so deeply rooted in human nature that it can't be unlearnt.

      Well said.

    3. At the very least they'll be able to say, when you're famous, that they've known you since way back.

      At least!

    4. If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail.

      True, as I have felt this towards others.

    5. those who dismiss them are in fact more likely to be right

      To be most often right yields less than to be most right i.e. when most disagree with you and are wrong.

    6. It is after all an extremely lucrative trick, and those tend to spread quickly.

      !

    7. We just don't have enough experience with early versions of ambitious projects to know how to respond to them

      Right, we justify to past experience instead of persisting on-vision. We might realise that the latter technique is a better response if we had more experience with early versions of ambitious projects.

    1. Conversely, you see a surprising number of really well-run startups that have all aspects of operations completely buttoned down, HR policies in place, great sales model, thoroughly thought-through marketing plan, great interview processes, outstanding catered food, 30" monitors for all the programmers, top tier VCs on the board—heading straight off a cliff due to not ever finding product/market fit.

      The stark example is encouraging. What's on show isn't the real story. Product/market fit is.

    2. You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of “blah”, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.

      Highlights, in plain English, how product market fit eludes.

    3. the market pulls product out of the startup

      [[Worth considering]].

    4. Just try having a great team and no product, or a great market and no product. What’s wrong with you?

      xD

    1. And lots of people picked shoes purely based on color. “I like green” was enough to turn someone away from a blue shoe that fit them better.

      Predictably irrational. Humans are just this quirky.

      Preferred colour > cutting-edge sole research!

  13. Aug 2021
    1. To facilitate the process, the king had a railway track constructed: two straight lines of glistening steel leading up to the dragon’s abode.

      You're seeing what I'm seeing...

    2. Nobody kept count

      And neither do we.

      A dispiriting detail that jolts reflection.

    3. Spiritual men sought to comfort those who were afraid of being eaten by the dragon (which included almost everyone, although many denied it in public) by promising another life after death, a life that would be free from the dragon-scourge.

      Analogy makes sense.