Zotero Catalogue

A lot of my problems boil down to an attachment to safe options, and a desire to not put myself out there. I try to dissect where this error comes from, and propose concrete actions to overcome it.

When I procrastinate, I often put something off until creeping guilt and deadlines force me out of inaction, and I do something about it. This generally sucks. But far worse, is when something is important but doesn’t have any deadlines, and can be put off indefinitely. I call this failure to ac

Why optimisation is the correct action by definition, and responses to common objections and mistakes

What are we really doing?

You can always do better. Don’t do a big project if the conversations you have w/ your future colleagues are not the most exciting ones you have. Prepare to live in times of change. What great people work on is overdetermined because it’s clear what the greatest thing to do is at any point in […]

» Mark has joined the call.

An AI agent used a stolen Tailscale auth key at Hugging Face. Workload identity federation, flow logs, and safer defaults could have reduced the risk.

A discussion of why I don’t intend to turn Gwern.net into a book, and how trying to write a book can harm writers.

On personal CRMs, a bus driving away, and what we lose when we outsource the work of remembering

Decades before recommendation algorithms, video stores served as social hubs where conversation and camaraderie became a form of taste-making.

We are currently fundraising for an animal care building that will become the core of Something Wild's rescue mission and will allow us to take on more animals and volunteers. Please consider donating on paypal, venmo, by cheque or here on our YouTube fundraiser. Every penny counts! You can also support us by buying adorable beaver merch from our online store.

Authors: Ahmed ElKady, Ahmed Y. Radwan, Shaina Raza Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models carry far more parameters than they activate. For each token that passes through, a learned router selects only a […]

Note: also check out my weekly “Best of Twitter” newsletter How to start using Twitter Sign up Check out the 20 people I like the most tweets from and follow the ones you like the most. Read Lama Al Rajih’s Twitter guide Rules for making twitter a wholesome experience Mute people you don’t want to see on your feed. It’s that simple. It will take a week or two when you start but now my feed, for example, has ~0 politics and engagement bait. Cool people …

Summary: in this post I explain why you should start a blog (to help others and to help yourself), what to write about, and how to start it. I hope to persuade you that you should start a blog even if you feel that you have nothing to say and even if almost nobody will read it. What to write about I looked over all of my writing and determined that it all originated from one of the following: I repeatedly gave the same advice to my friends Why You Should Join Twitter Right Now Every …

I turned 30 last week and a friend asked me if I'd figured out any life advice in the past decade worth passing on.  I'm somewhat hesitant to publish this because I think these lists usually seem...

Cute lamb needs attention, Trying to hold the camera and pet the cute lamb at the same time 😂

Parents want accountability after study went disastrously wrong, Science and Retraction Watch investigation reveals

Thread by @patio11: "Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite evein them having been taught before. In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To H […]"

The Industrial Electronics Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland, has built a prototype of a revolutionary two-wheeled vehicle. Due to its configuration with two coaxial wheels, each of which is coupled to a DC motor, the vehicle is able to do stationary U-turns. A control system, made up of two decoupled state-space controllers, pilots the motors so as to keep the system in equilibrium

1.5% of SF’s population lives in city-funded housing. 26% of its drug OD deaths happen there.

Autoregressive and diffusion models are trained on a single step but inferenced on thousands. Why does this work at all?

Bill of Materials.

The Lonely Man of Faith is a timeless philosophical essay by one of the twentieth century¿s greatest Jewish philosophers, Talmudic scholars, and religious leaders, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. In this classic work, Rabbi Soloveitchik probes the inner experience of those who seek both redemptive closeness with God and creative engagement with the world. With characteristic brilliance and eloquence, he delineates the struggle of people of faith to navigate between seemingly contradictory aspects of the human condition: the spiritual and the material, the religious and the scientific, the covenantal and the majestic.

Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation, the eSpecial heard round the world that ignited a firestorm of debate and redefined the nature of our economic malaise, is now-at last-a book. America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, media wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess? One political party tries to increase government spending even when we have no good plan for paying for ballooning programs like Medicare and Social Security. The other party seems to think tax cuts will raise revenue and has a record of creating bigger fiscal disasters that the first. Where does this madness come from? As Cowen argues, our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, the low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau. The fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. That's it. That is what has gone wrong and that is why our politics is crazy. Cowen reveals the underlying causes of our past prosperity and how we will generate it again. This is a passionate call for a new respect of scientific innovations that benefit not only the powerful elites, but humanity as a whole.

From a bestselling author and economist, a contemporary moral case for economic growth—and a dose of inspiration and optimism about our future possibilities.Growth is good. Throughout history, economic growth in particular has alleviated human misery, improved human happiness and opportunity, and lengthened human lives. Wealthier societies are more stable, offer better living standards, produce better medicines, and ensure greater autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun. If we want to continue our trend of growth—and the overwhelmingly positive outcomes for societies that come with it—every individual must become more concerned with the welfare of those around us. So how do we proceed? Tyler Cowen, in a culmination of 20 years of thinking and research, provides a roadmap for moving forward. In Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals, he argues that our reason and common sense can help free us of the faulty ideas that hold us back as people and as a society, allowing us to set our sights on the long-term struggles that maximize sustainable economic growth while respecting human rights. Stubborn Attachments, at its heart, makes the contemporary moral case for economic growth, and delivers a great dose of inspiration and optimism about our future possibilities.