jebarker

I second this and would add that it's really easy to catastrophically forget things in math. I'm pretty sure that most CS knowledge I have I will retain at a level where I won't forget the general ideas and re-reading materials can quickly refresh the details. This is not true for advanced math. I did a pure math PhD and my own thesis is impenetrable to me 20 years later. It would take months, if not years, of focused effort for me to regain the understanding.

Do things you are bad at

I think this should be coupled with: know when to quit. I've persisted with some things I'm bad at out of stubbornness but have never improved and it's just burned me out.

Indeed. To get "aesthetic" play you would have to mimic real human play for an interesting reason: the space of possible Go configurations and games is so mind-bogglingly vast that all of human history has only ever seen a infinitesimal sample. So any sense of aesthetics is just a consequence of chance and memetics. AlphaZero is effectively exploring a new branch of Go history so its aesthetics are completely different. Although maybe that just shows that the idea of aesthetics here isn't very meaningful.

This is the wrong way to think about mathematical (or any other kind of) creativity in my opinion. In the extremely high-dimensional space of "ideas" (whatever that means) there are almost certainly profound ideas that are the interpolation of existing knowledge, i.e. the curse of dimensionality. It's not at all clear that you need to extrapolate from existing knowledge to be creative.

There are off the shelf supplements that are widely used for this, e.g. BeetElite which contains nitric oxide derived from beet juice. I can testify that they do offer a real performance benefit - in my case I've found them beneficial when running at altitude as a (very) amateur. I'm not sure how/when something like this should become a banned PED.

Oh! I actually thought I tried to be really careful to get that right and somehow still didn't see I'd transposed the j and c. Definitely no harm intended!

This is a really enjoyable read. Majiec is a great writer and speaker. A breath of fresh air compared much of modern blog/essay content.

I’ve found Coros to be great too. I’ve used my Vertix to track GPS for 48 hours continuously during a race. It’s been beaten up against rocks, soaking wet and filthy for extended periods and still works 100%. Just yesterday it saved me from a minor emergency when I got lost on a new trail and needed to backtrack. After years of use it still has weeks of battery life for tracking daily workouts. I don’t use any of the smartwatch features like notifications though and wear a mechanical watch as my daily driver.

Ego is also at play here. In inherently competitive fields like academic science using LLMs to get results more quickly is an alluring siren.

What makes this a hobby project? He’s a university professor so developing teaching material is part of his job.

I know many, many people that have continued to increase their expenses as their income grows but would also like to FIRE in theory. There’s a whole movement called FatFIRE that is basically full of these people

I don’t doubt it’s possible, but suggesting that the game isn’t simulating FIRE because it includes lifestyle inflation seems wrong.

Are you suggesting that everyone with FIRE aspirations avoids lifestyle creep?

Exactly, it’s about the choice of word but I don’t think it’s meaningless semantics.

No, we don’t agree it’s “deserved” in any cases. I agree in the self defense case it’s justifiable based on near certainty about the outcome if you don’t respond with lethal force. That has nothing to do with “deserved”, which is always subjective unless we discover some universal moral code we’re all bound to abide by. So I think where we agree is that it’s all opinion.

I don’t find this a convincing argument. This works as an argument for permitting lethal force to end a life-threatening attack. But once someone is already detained there’s no way that killing them meaningfully increases public protection over just keeping them locked up.

How do you define “deserve” in any kind of objective way?

As far as I’m aware there is no native Pandora app, just TuneIn for internet radio. Do for Pandora you’d have to stream from a phone via Bluetooth.

As an R1S owner I feel like the elephant in the room is that the Rivian developed infotainment software is just not very good. For example, the Spotify app has weird scrolling issues and the interface for offline downloads is clunky and unreliable. The maps/route planning is fine but not really any better than Apple/Google Maps (or ABRP). So I find it hard to give much credit to their argument against CarPlay when they’re not providing a better experience via their native apps.

This works with dairy-free milk too. My daughter has a dairy allergy and figuring out we could turn pea milk into pea buttermilk with a tbsp of white vinegar upped her pancake experience significantly.

This is so true. A few years ago I was volunteering at a running race that’s very hard to get into and many people have as a life dream. I found it kind of amusing how many people were having pity parties in the latter stages of the race despite having dreamed of getting into it for years, maybe decades.

Thanks for the great answer and practical steps involved in the transition.

How did you transition from tech to teaching?

What does it even mean to say you want to build something but you don’t know what it is?

I think it depends what they’re hoping to get out of it.

Imagine being able to afford a Ferrari and then buying the one that looks like a fancy Prius

It’s kind of surprising that diamonds still have appeal as jewelry at all given the rise of lab-grown. I always assumed that people liked them because they were rare and expensive.

AlphaFold has a shared technical ancestry with LLMs and many people believe that was a truly significant advancement of science that may lead to benefits for humanity and the planet. I don't think this was a one-off fluke, strongly generalizing pattern matchers will be useful in many areas of science even if LLMs turn out to be overblown.

By having a job. If that job is the same as your intellectual/artistic pursuit then you have to balance the needs of satisfying your employer and what keeps your motivation going over the long term. All I’m saying is that worrying too much about future achievement or “great contributions” are a recipe for burnout and disappointment.

“Comparison is the thief of joy.”

Do the math because you enjoy doing the math and if you do it long enough you may well do something of value to someone else. Same goes for most intellectual and artistic pursuits I think.

I’ve learned for myself that as soon as enjoyment is based on some future achievement or ranking my work against others the day to day satisfaction dries up.