Sunday Reads #2
2 de febrero 2025- AI firms.
- Updating my COVID-origin stance to “most likely zoonosis but honestly don’t know really”
- Caring is the advantage.
- “how important doing hard things is to me. It is the heart beat of my life, and I don’t 100% understand why, but it probably has something to do with me having not the best childhood.”
- The Vatican on AI.
- Peace and trade.
- This week I was in trains a bunch. I worked with no internet which means programming with no Cursor, I realized how used I am to tabbing. It was nice having to type it all for a couple hours.
- Also, I am very excited to share what we’ve been working on at Tinybird. We are already showing some things, and will start officially announcing things in the next few weeks. I think it is the coolest thing I have ever worked on.
- I read some of Ted Chiang’s short stories. One of them is particularly well-known.
- I enjoyed The Weeknd’s new album. I’d start with these three tracks. Also, the Anitta collab slaps.
- Nabeel’s principles.
- Status is fake and transient. Just focus on substance and doing valuable work. Talk about it in public. Beware the inner ring fallacy.
That C.S. Lewis speech is the best link in there (and in here too most likely).
- One key to effective negotiation is to have multiple options and be OK with it not working out. Even if you really need the thing, it’s never your onlychoice: reframe and create alternative options until you have multiple outcomes you’re ok with. (See BATNA.)
I first learned about this in Getting to yes. Everyone has an intuition about this.
- There’s a lot of alpha in being willing to do “menial” work (take notes, send out agendas, order pizza, manually inspect raw data, whatever). Beware over-delegation and being too far from the details.
YES YES YES. So much value. Shows your character too.
- Most intelligent people want status, prestige, wealth and the like – even the ones who claim not to. “Genius” is a distinct category to intelligence and geniuses are motivated by entirely different things and are socially strange (and often selfish) people. Ayn Rand is a bad writer but is one of the very few people who grokked this and made it explicit.
This is both true and an Ayn Rand reference. No commentary needed I just wanted to praise it
- When writing, separate the “creator” and the “editor”. The “creator” just writes, and doesn’t worry about quality; the goal is words on the page. Later, you can be the “editor” and shape it into something good.
True in code too. In fact, you can write, scratch, and rewrite(https://grantslatton.com/software-pathfinding#write-everything-twice).
- Be careful about rationalizing something that does not feel right. (Utilitarians, this means you!)
The only reason I get these references and other philosophy ones is because of this book. Michael Huemer is an outstanding writer.
(Nope, no links on DeepSeek)