pmohun

I've always found The Republic the most approachable of the major works of philosophy. Even so, I struggle with the prose.

It made me think: is there a better way to read the classics?

The result: a iMessage interface that presents The Republic in a fresh way.

Strange but true: p5 was a major component in the recent popularization of generative art — a branch of computer art that relies on computer generated visuals based on random seeds.

p5 was a core dependency for Art Blocks, a popular Ethereum art platform that gained popularity due to its asset class of entirely generative artworks.

It was his willingness to spend inordinate amounts of times working out answers to problems himself, instead of trusting the work of others. He explains in his autobiographies that this gave him a “different set of tools” than other people, which allowed him to tackle problems that others couldn’t or wouldn’t because they seemed insignificant.

Related: https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1559737765566173185

It will be interesting to see the next version of robots.txt that begins to appear in public repos to prevent this type of data scraping.

It’s a good question.

The reason that GDP growth is so important is because it raises the standard of living for those who aren’t yet born. If you accept the premise that lives in the future matter just as much as those today, then the vast majority of human lives are yet to be born and therefore deserve consideration about what to do __today__.

Even small changes in GDP growth (e.g. 1-2% per year) has dramatic compounding effects over a multi decade timeframe.

For a great book on this, I recommend Tyler Cowen’s Stubborn Attachments which discusses the ethics of economic growth: https://press.stripe.com/stubborn-attachments

this was a lot of fun. thanks for sharing!

You just accidentally rediscovered Zeno’s paradox

Excited to see Fernando Pessoa on HN. He's easily my favorite poet. The Book of Disquiet is under appreciated and I've recommended it to many friends.

I agree! The best websites are those maintained by individuals without a profit motive. Here's a short list that I've started collecting:

- Kevin Kelly: kk.org

- Patrick Collison: patrickcollison.com

- Patrick McKenzie: kalzumeus.com

- David Perell: perell.com

- Berthub.eu

- Alexey Guzey: https://guzey.com/

- https://www.gwern.net/index

- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/

- https://dcgross.com/

- Paul Graham: paulgraham.com

- https://nintil.com/

- Laura Deming: https://www.ldeming.com/

- Sam Altman: https://blog.samaltman.com/

- Casey Handmer: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/

if you haven't read Immanuel Velikovsky, you should. start with "Worlds in Collision". he talks about this exact phenomenon.

disclaimer: his work is widely cited as pseudoscience. it's a good read if you're looking for entertainment value, but try not to take it too seriously :)

This essay from David Perell touches on a similar concept: https://perell.com/note/lateral-thinking-with-withered-ideas...

> It led to the 20th century’s most successful game console: the Game Boy. One day, a gaming engineer named Gunpei Yokoi was commuting home on the train when he saw a man playing with an LCD calculator next to him. Unfortunately, Nintendo didn’t have the budget to push the technological frontier at the time, so they used old technology to innovate. So long as the gameplay was engaging, Yokoi believed that players didn’t care about technical details like colors or screen resolutions. Compared to its contemporaries, the Game Boy was durable and affordable, which removed barriers to entry for users and developers. People would play for hours because it used AA batteries that were cheap and easy to find. Today, the Game Boy has sold more than 118 million units.

This specific visualization is limited to 37% of the hash power on the network. It's possible that it is a representative sample, but I don't think we can assume that.

I would go a step further, and say that prompt design will become an important sector of programming.

Modern language models (eg GPT-3 et al) offer the capability to take a natural language input, match it against the context of the sentence, then propose a query that is understandable to the layperson. This abstraction allows us to understand the problem better, rather than just analyzing the way the problem manifests itself in code. Having a programming language that mirrors our everyday communication is an important step forward in making the innovations from software broadly available.

The next wave of programmers will need to understand how human language can be used to efficiently guide models to solve problems that can’t be solved by human-written code. This is a big challenge, and we’re just at the very beginning of it, but I think it will open up new and undiscovered ways to create value in the world.

I have quite a few additional thoughts on the topic which I’ve captured here: https://sundayscaries.substack.com/p/whos-the-real-expert

I thought about this pretty much constantly for a year. I wrote down everything I came up with here: https://sundayscaries.substack.com/p/nurturing-curiosity

tl;dr: combine ideas from different domains, talk with friends who have interesting ideas, work on things that interest you

Whenever I read a comment that says "email is dead" I feel it is my responsibility to point out that ~it doesn't have to be this way~

The email standard(s) are great. Powerful, decentralized, and damn near universal. It's just that we live in a world where a Duopoly has taken over most of what we consider to be email.

If this comment resonated with you, I am working on something you might be interested in. Feel free to DM me for details.

I recently went through the process of transitioning out of my role as a Product Manager at a Fortune 30 company. It struck me just how large of a variance exists in success of the transition process across employees.

I wrote this post to help others who are considering how to spend their last few weeks at a company. There will be many demands for your attention -- this attempts to help you prioritize what is important to spend time doing.