The fact that AI models can be so easily distilled and replicated is such a stroke of luck.

Ten or 15 years ago, if one had asked me to envision a future in which a private company invents artificial intelligence, I'd have thought for sure that it would have a massive moat, be very difficult to catch, and create an almost instant monopoly.

Instead, it seems that selling intelligence might end up as a race to the bottom.

Who would've thought that having access to enough textual inputs and outputs, along with a vaguely similar transformer architecture, would be enough to copy rather useful intelligence?

— Hacker News

I ate one almond the other day. Then I felt bad about water usage, so I thought to myself: Well, I just won’t make the next 15,000 AI queries I was planning on making.

— Nic Carter

On 23 December 1975, Rob Parsons and his wife Dianne were preparing for Christmas at their Cardiff home when they heard a knock at the door.

On their doorstep stood a man with a bin bag containing his possessions in his right hand and a frozen chicken in his left.

Rob studied the man's face and vaguely remembered him as Ronnie Lockwood, someone he would occasionally see at Sunday School as a boy — and who he was told to be kind to as he was "a bit different".

"I said, Ronnie, what's with the chicken? He said, Somebody gave it to me for Christmas. And then I said two words that changed all of our lives... And I'm not exactly sure why I said them. I said, Come in."

What began as an act of compassion lasted 45 years — until the day Ronnie died.

— BBC

Thinking about creating a movement to promote hobbit software:

Pretty chill, keeps to itself, tends to its databases, hangs out with other hobbit software at the pub, broadly unbothered by the scheming of wizards and orcs, oblivious to the rise and fall of software empires around them.

“Oh, the Electron empire is going to war with the Reacts? Sounds ghastly; sorry to hear that. Me and the lads are off to the pub to run some cronjobs — want to come along?”

— Dave Anderson

Many of these ocean-dwelling ancients evolved sophisticated sensors for light, sound, and chemicals. But, as far as we know, they did not communicate by sound. It would take about another 200 million years or more for animals to call or sing.

Why did sonic communication take so long to blossom? We do not know for sure, and paleontologists may yet discover fossils of ancient sound makers, but it's also possible that the keen ears of listening predators muzzled life's sonic evolution. All of the early animal predators — arthropods and fish especially — could detect vibrations in water or, later, tremors in the soil on land. To cry out was to invite death.

No creatures sang when the seas first swarmed with animal life or when the oceans' reefs first rose. Primeval forests contained no trilling insects or chorusing vertebrate animals. For more than nine-tenths of its history, Earth lacked any communicative sounds. Animals signaled only by catching the eye of another, or through touch and chemicals.

— David G. Haskell

When art critics get together they talk about form, and structure, and meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.

— Pablo Picasso

“If Kobe saw that you were afraid, it’s over for you — whether you’re the teammate, or family member, or whatever,” said Brian Shaw, who joined Jackson’s coaching staff in 2005.

Many times Shaw would try to prevent Kobe from intimidating a teammate at practice. “You’re going to kill his spirit. He can’t take what you can take.”

“Then he doesn’t need to be out here,” Kobe would reply.

— The Soul of Basketball

A good test of whether people are passionate about something:

Is there a subreddit for it?

— Chris Dixon

When everyone present has said something out loud, there is a greater chance that they will join in the discussion later. Beginning with a handshake and an introduction also immediately levels out the hierarchy to a certain extent.

In the world of compliance, this is called flattening the authority gradient. Now it’s Maria or Elliot performing the operation, not a silent artist who occasionally barks “forceps”, “swab”, and “more coffee”.

Doctors rank above nurses, who are above healthcare assistants, and so on. Just like in the military, a clear hierarchy has its benefits when it comes to making split-second life-and-death decisions. But hierarchies often interfere with optimal treatment. It’s still not unheard of for a surgeon to operate on a patient’s healthy leg by mistake or mess up a procedure without anyone stepping in.

— I'm Afraid Debbie From Marketing Has Left For The Day

In the words of Winnie the Pooh:

“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

That silly old bear sure did know a thing or two about living your best life, but my guy Eeyore came up with the best quote of all:

“It never hurts to keep looking for sunshine.”

— Van Life, Cancer Edition Finale

Every once in a while I think about how my ideal note-taking app is essentially just a really nice/flexible GUI for a SQLite database — but I don’t think anything like this exists, and I think that says a lot about the failures of personal computing.

— Alexis King

My basic rule is: analogies are great for a sympathetic audience and bad for an antagonistic one.

• If you're trying to illuminate something to someone who wants to understand your point, an analogy is a great shortcut to building a tangible architecture in their mind.
• But if the other person has an opposing viewpoint and you're trying to dismantle that and replace it with yours, analogies usually end up just moving the goalposts in the argument.

— Bob Nystrom

One of the better NBA Draft stories:

GM Billy Knight points out that Zaza Pachulia and Shelden Williams are the only Hawks who are wide in the thighs. "They are the only two guys we have who aren't what we call narrow butts. The other guys are thin guys, slender builds, so you need some physicality on your team."

So he's looking for one more wide butt?

"It depends on the butt," Knight said. In which case Horford may well be their pick.

— Sports Illustrated

In the age of cell phones, the area code has become the ancestral clan name or heraldry. It is a marker of old stories, loyalties, a statement that says "there was a land I came from but am there no longer."

— Twitter

The first useful thing Buchheit built was a search engine for his own email. (And it did indeed take only a day to accomplish.)

His previous project had been Google Groups, which indexed Usenet discussion groups. All he had to do was hack Groups’ lightning-fast search feature to point it at his mail rather than Usenet.

At first, Buchheit’s email search engine ran on a server at his own desk.

— Time

The amount of iterations you have on a project matter more than the amount of time you spend on it.

— Mark Saroufim

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse is also true — a complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work.

— John Gall

Are we still obsessing over mythical big data? Because the real problem in most orgs is 50,000 very small data sets — some barely maintained — loosely tied together between Slack, Dropbox, Postgres, S3, and a bunch of Excels.

— Gwen Shapira

80% of time on mobile devices is spent in apps.

85% of mobile app time is spent in the user's Top 5 apps.

— Ben Bajarin

Drinking Rivers is like if you’ve never driven a car before and someone puts you behind the wheel of a rocket ship and says, “Okay, off you go!”

More info: Grenada’s Rivers Antoine Rum Distillery

Not to jump into solution mode, but did you consider adding a fourth Sign up button here?

— Jonas Maaløe on the state of Twitter UX

The oldest known building is a place called Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. It’s a funny place because it didn’t have a proper roof or walls, and there’s no evidence at all that people ever lived there. Nor are there any traces of residential properties thereabouts.

This makes sense as Göbekli Tepe dates from about 10,000 BC, which is before humans settled down to agriculture. So the place appears to have been made by hunter-gatherers as a kind of temple. It’s a big place and the slabs of stone used to make it weighed up to 16 tons. So a lot of different tribes would have to have gathered there to put it all together.

There are some big stone tubs in Göbekli Tepe — the biggest held about 40 gallons — and they contain traces of a chemical called oxalate, which is formed when barley and water are mixed. When barley and water are mixed, beer quite naturally ferments. So it would appear that Göbekli Tepe was some sort of meeting place where the tribes gathered and drank beer together. It would be a pleasant place to get whiffled: top of a hill, nice view.

But it looks like there was beer, and, importantly, it looks like there was beer before there were temples and before there was farming. This leads to the great theory of human history: that we didn’t start farming because we wanted food — there was loads of that around. We started farming because we wanted booze.

This makes a lot more sense than you might think, for several reasons. First, beer is easier to make than bread as no hot oven is required. Second, beer contains vitamin B, which humans require if they’re going to be healthy and strong. Hunters get their vitamin B by eating other animals. On a diet of bread and no beer, grain farmers will all turn into anaemic weaklings and be killed by the big healthy hunters. But fermentation of wheat and barley produces vitamin B.

If beer was worth travelling for (which Göbekli Tepe suggests it was) and if beer was a religious drink (which Göbekli Tepe suggests it was), then even the most ardent huntsman might be persuaded to settle down and grow some good barley to brew it with. And so in about 9000 BC, we invented farming because we wanted to get drunk on a regular basis.

— A Short History of Drunkenness

When Brazilian soccer club Santa Cruz do Sul lost 4-1 to Grêmio in February 2012, there was one Santa Cruz fan in the stadium — a loyal 23-year-old superfan named Tiago Rech. He was pictured sitting alone in the stands, feeling the pain of a season...

When Santa Cruz won the state FGF Cup and qualified for Copa do Brasil in December 2020, it was the ultimate success for Tiago personally — for he had turned the club around as president.

"When I was around 15 years old, I started thinking about becoming a board member or even the club's president. I always dreamt to win a title, to make the difference. From being the only fan in the stadium, to election as president, and now a champion."

— COPA90

There are many lunatics on Twitter. I have absolutely no idea how some of these people make it through everyday life.

— Zuby

In everyday speech, the use of half long predated the other fractions. This is the earliest entry in the Oxford English Dictionary (from year 835):

Him man selle an half swulung an ciollan dene.

The earliest reference to third as a fraction is from half a millennium later: year 1384.

— Stack Exchange

The Chicken of Tomorrow award marked the rise of a vast new industry and the metamorphosis of the backyard bird into a technological wonder akin to missiles, the transistor, and the thermonuclear weapon — which had been tested for the first time six weeks earlier.

The winning bird was chosen not for its exotic stature or pure breeding, but for its similarity to a wax model of the perfect carcass as devised by a team of poultry scientists. The grilled chicken in your sandwich or wrap comes from a descendant of the bird that Vantress created by crossing California Cornish males with New Hampshire females.

Until the early 1950s, most US flocks contained no more than 200 chickens, about the size advocated by ancient Roman agricultural writers 2,000 years earlier. In the wake of the Chicken of Tomorrow contest, farms raised tens of thousands of birds, some as many as 100,000. A hen that might live a dozen years on a farm could now be fattened and slaughtered in six brief weeks.

— Andrew Lawler

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received came from Hiroshi Mikitani, the CEO of Rakuten. He said everything changes at roughly every 3rd and 10th step.

When you go from one person to three people it’s different. When it’s just you, you know what you are doing — and then you have three people and you have to rethink how you are doing everything.

But when there are ten people, it’s all going to change again. And when there are 30 people, it will change again. Same when you reach 100 people.

At every one of those steps everything kind of breaks. Everything. Your communication systems, and your payroll, and your accounting, and customer support. Everything that you put into place needs to change when you put in those three and 10 steps.

— Phil Libin

Cosmic latte is the average color of the universe, found by a team of astronomers from Johns Hopkins University. In 2001, Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry determined that the average color of the universe was a greenish white, but they soon corrected their analysis in a 2002 paper in which they reported that their survey of the light from over 200,000 galaxies averaged to a slightly beigeish white. The hex triplet value for cosmic latte is #FFF8E7.

— Wikipedia

Zillow made the same mistake that every new quant trader makes early on: Mistaking an adversarial environment for a random one.

The real answer isn't "bad luck". It's that, despite what your models say, the market isn't random thermodynamic noise. The market is an ecosystem — one where everything is trying to kill you all the time.

— Doug Colkitt

"The only thing an old man can tell a young man is that it goes fast, real fast, and if you’re not careful it’s too late. Of course, the young man will never understand this truth."

— Norm Macdonald

Helena Fitzgerald is a great writer:

The two characters from the first movie find each other again, but the point of the story is that finding each other undoes none of the losses of nine years before. They cannot ever go back to that single perfect day; even in love, you can only ever move forward.

Like a miracle, these two people locate each other again out of all the churn and unlikeliness of the whole world, but they can’t ever be with the young version of one another. The person they lost is still lost. They can’t ever have the romance they imagined having with the person they fell in love with, because that person no longer exists.

This paper compares estimates of teacher value-added in mathematics and ELA with parallel estimates on a biomarker that teachers should not impact: student height.

Using administrative data from New York City, we find estimated teacher “effects” on height are comparable in magnitude to actual teacher effects on math and ELA achievement, 0.22: compared to 0.29 and 0.26 respectively. On its face, such results raise concerns about the validity of these models.

— Teacher effects on student achievement and height

Our first kid was born a week after I turned 27.

We got married at 23. If you had asked me at 25 whether I was ready for a kid, I would have said "No."

That summer my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer. That put things into much sharper focus, and it turned into a question of "If not now, when?" — so we decided to go for it.

My dad got to meet his first grandchild. Three weeks later his cancer started growing again. Three months later he was dead.

In my opinion, the greatest disservice we do to the young is shielding them from the reality that life comes to an end, and it's going to pass by whether you are ready for it or not.

Adulthood is basically accepting that there are things you want / need to do, even though you are afraid or uncertain how they will turn out.

— Hacker News

LinkedIn is bizarre because it tries to make this hostage situation fun. Even though it’s not. Not when you add stories, audio messages, DMs, a social feed, or anything else. The platform might be less alternate universe and more down to earth if the truth was acknowledged: performative professionalism, job hunting, and networking are extensions of work — not play.

— Fadeke Adegbuyi

Software – yes-code software – has been around for a while. One of the things we’ve learned as an industry is how to write software that evolves. (We’re not perfect – sad, legacy systems still proliferate...)

We need to be able to change software to accommodate changing circumstances without rewriting it, and that is fundamentally what software engineering is: how to change software systems. Change is the name of the game.

I think no-code tools are instead an extension of a different trend: reifying workflows. Business processes and workflows used to be documented in Word docs strewn about the office or on a shared folder, or even just passed down by oral tradition in companies. Now, we have tools that allow us to build these workflows, talk about them, edit them, and share them more concretely. This is a huge boon for more repeatable business processes and for getting things done quickly! I think this is the true win of no-code tools: concretizing workflows.

— Linus Lee

At a recent writers’ workshop, the instructor labored heroically to keep the discussion centered upon issues of craft (as yet unlearned), while the writers (as yet unpublished) labored equally to divert the focus with questions about royalties, movie rights, and sequels.

— Art & Fear

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

— Jorge Luis Borges

One may be mystified as to why averaging helps so much, but there is a simple reason for the effectiveness of averaging.

Suppose that two classifiers have an error rate of 70%. Then, when they agree they are right. But when they disagree, one of them is often right, so now the average prediction will place much more weight on the correct answer.

The effect will be especially strong whenever the network is confident when it’s right and unconfident when it’s wrong.

— Ilya Sutskever

Negative intuitions are generally correct. Positive intuitions are generally wrong.

Negative intuition: "This feels off, it gives me the creeps, etc." There's danger outside your conscious thought.

Positive intuition: "I have a good feeling about this one, it's a good culture fit, etc." There's social signaling outside your conscious thought.

— Tim Rooney

Every famous athlete retires twice, first from the game and then from talking about the game... It takes a certain knack, a quickness of mind, and an ability to say nothing while sounding like I am saying some­thing. I have to learn to speak while a producer is talking into my ear, giving me some statistics that I can use in support of a vacuous thesis about the first half of a basketball game that will be forgotten tomorrow.

I worry that I am not up to the task of explaining the essence of basketball as it is played at the highest levels. I feel that it is like trying to explain music through words or to describe a painting through text. You can give a feeling of the work, or compare it to something else, but you can't re-create the actual feeling of being on the court, or making that move, of imposing your will, of the precise moment that you realize you can reach the front of the rim...

A subtle shift of weight, a lowering of the hands, a leaning forward, a glance, and that is enough to set off a chain of events. They are actions that stem from a thousand tiny in­stincts. But from where we are sitting above the court, we are unable to explain the game through these small moments, and instead talk about the Bulls' second chance scoring and the Rockets' bench production...

I don't want this. I don't want to spend the rest of my life talking about basketball.

— Dr J

From Wikipedia:

Newton's Flaming Laser Sword is a philosophical razor devised by Mike Alder in an essay on the conflicting positions of scientists and philosophers on epistemology and knowledge. It can be summarized as "what cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating".

From the original essay:

It seems to me fair game to use the Flaming Laser Sword on the philosopher who meddles in science which he does not understand.

• When he asks questions and is willing to learn, I have no quarrel with him.
• When he is merely trying to lure you into a word game with no prospect of leading anywhere, you have to decide if you like playing that sort of game.

Mathematicians and scientists feel that they have found a more difficult but much more satisfying game to play. Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword is one of the rules of that game.

This is an example of "authoritative parroting" where people simply repeat what they have heard on the topic, without actually stopping to check if what they have heard is correct. So the same misinformation is passed on, regurgitated, repeated, and made true; solely on the basis of the source, rather than whether or not it is actually correct.

— Eat Stop Eat

“Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born,” Richard Dawkins writes, in Unweaving the Rainbow. “The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.” It’s mind-boggling to even consider. “In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”

We have won the impossible, improbable lottery of birth. And we don’t know what will happen. We never can. There’s no skill in birth and death. At the beginning and at the end, luck reigns unchallenged. Here’s the truth: most of the world is noise, and we spend most of our lives trying to make sense of it. We are, in the end, nothing more than interpreters of static. We can never see beyond the present moment. We don’t know what the next card will be — and we don’t even know when we see it if it’s good or bad.

In 1979, Carl Sagan wrote about the awe of the universe in his notebooks, as a counterpoint to the irrationality of superstition and false belief. “We live in a universe where atoms are made in the stars; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Galaxy,” Sagan reflects. “How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience...”

— Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff

I wish I was half the math genius a lot of people think I am — I pretty much got here with well-applied high school math.

— John Carmack

Web nerds in 2005: You know, blogs are great, you hear so many voices you can't hear elsewhere. But we should get rid of the comments, they're awful.

Social media: Got it, get rid of blogs, leave comments section.

— Paul Ford

Time makes everything mean, and shabby, and wrinkled. The tragedy of life... is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.

— Raymond Chandler

Product design is making things simpler to achieve, not adding new features.

— Ben Tossell

Over the last couple of years I’ve noticed a consolidation in programming language choice in commercial and open source projects. The software industry is always changing, but there seems to be persistent interest and investment in a few select languages: JavaScript, Python, Java, and Go — the “Big Four.”

— Ivan Malopinsky

People miss the point of the "minimum viable product" for startups.

It does not mean, "release the first version with less features and then add more features later."

No, we want a minimum viable product. The absolutely smallest set of features needed in order to get useful market information. How many features is that? Usually... zero.

An MVP can be just a slide presentation, a sales pitch, a web site, a Google ad, or a customer conversation. The best MVPs let you objectively measure customer response fast and then tweak.

One quick way to start is to make a web site that claims to offer the product you'd eventually want to build, and then gives a signup form, and then (oops!) crashes when people try to buy it (or sign up). Then make some web ads to send people there based on certain keywords.

No, not a page that says "Coming Soon!" and asks for an email address. You want a real, live, signup page for what looks like a real, live product. You can add the "it works" feature later. In the meantime, since your MVP is so cheap and fast to build, you can try lots of different ones, add and remove advertised features, and see how that changes user responses.

Once you have some input like that, you can make something slightly less minimal. Doing an MVP this way requires incredible self-control. Most people fail.

— Avery Pennarun

Most academics are still not aware that their insular "State of the Art" approaches are far short of what any Kaggle Grandmaster would do in 24 hours.

— Jeremy Howard

Settings are for successful products. For MVPs, just get the defaults right.

— David Sacks

All enterprise software competes with Excel.

All productivity software competes with emailing things to yourself.

— Pavel Samsonov

Tetris is oddly one of the few games to accurately portray our lives.

Your accomplishments vanish but hold value, while failures pile up until a resolution is fabricated.

— Reddit

Washing machines are robots, but they're not intelligent. They don't know what water or clothes are. Moreover, they're not general purpose even in the narrow domain of washing - you can't put dishes in a washing machine, nor clothes in a dishwasher (or rather, you can, but you won’t get the result you want).

They're just another kind of automation, no different conceptually to a conveyor belt or a pick-and-place machine.

Equally, machine learning lets us solve classes of problem that computers could not usefully address before, but each of those problems will require a different implementation, and different data, a different route to market, and often a different company.

Each of them is a piece of automation. Each of them is a washing machine.

— Benedict Evans

Periodic reminder that rejecting the null (p < .05) doesn't mean your hypothesis is correct, it just means it's unlikely the data came from a random number generator.

There's a lot of space between a random number generator and your favorite hypothesis...

— Tal Yarkoni

My only two requests for this version of Dropbox were for it to use as much memory as possible and somehow also be a web browser — and boy did they deliver. Thanks, Dropbox.

— Nick Heer

Somewhere in the middle of the conversation my tone switched from “Yeah, what a loser to be concerned about that kind of thing” to “Yeah, poor guy, apparently he drew the short straw in the Things To Be Fascinated About Lottery.”

Since then I have returned to the idea of this Things To Be Fascinated About Lottery a lot. There are some good draws you can get:

• People who are fascinated with business — and intrinsically motivated to pursue it — only need high IQ and a few other subsidiary skills to get super rich.

• People who draw math can pursue perfect pure and philosophical truth, or excel at pretty much any science they choose and advance human knowledge.

• People who draw science without math have a harder time — but there are still places for them.

Then there are other people who get other straws. I’d hate to turn this into a “rank which straws are best” contest, but some certainly earn you more money, some certainly help you contribute to the future of humankind more, and some certainly land you in healthy areas of study with nice people and mostly rational thought...

— Scott Alexander

Many years later, when NeXT acquired Apple for negative -$400M, I was recruited by Steve's right hand man to come in and build iMovie 1.0, in large part because I knew a lot about NeXTSTEP, the technology which was to become MacOS X -- and because I think Steve liked PasteUp, and liked me, and thought I could get it done (we were done ahead of schedule, as it turned out).

I can still remember some of those early meetings, with 3 or 4 of us in a locked room somewhere on Apple campus, with a lot of whiteboards, talking about what iMovie should be (and should not be). It was as pure as pure gets, in terms of building software. Steve would draw a quick vision on the whiteboard, we'd go work on it for a while, bring it back, find out the ways in which it sucked, and we'd iterate, again and again and again. That's how it always went. Iteration. It's the key to design, really. Just keep improving it until you have to ship it.

— Glenn Reid

Famously, Wikipedia isn’t a well-planned operation. Its salaried employees are massively outnumbered by tens of thousands of “editors” who, attracted by Wikipedia’s vision or irritated by its inaccuracies, take it upon themselves to contribute...

These contributing editors not only write articles, they also argue with each other. How should they describe controversial issues or track down hoaxes and errors? What should they do with ill-intentioned or chronically ill-behaved editors? How should they punctuate the movie title “Star Trek Into Darkness”?

Some pages urged users to be civil or to be neutral, for example, while others, written later, tried to understand what being civil, or being neutral, really meant. Some pages were concerned with truth, others with proper formatting (in case you’re wondering: Wikipedia is formally neutral on the Oxford Comma). Some talked about the importance of being polite, but others warned about how a preoccupation with politeness can undermine excellence...

One mistake I think we will avoid is the idea that social worlds evolve toward a stationary state. Whether we look inside parliament houses or web servers, we see dynamism and change: new ideas and unexpected logics of development. Some we may find silly, outdated, or even abhorrent. Others exciting, new, or perplexing.

When we study the complex patterns that emerge from human interaction, we find laws of invention, turmoil, and creation – not stability.

— Simon DeDeo

I was nervous. That's a bad feeling: when you're in the dressing room and the man says, "World Champ, you've got five more minutes."

You get up and you warm up. And then you look in the monitor and you see all the people. You think about all the cities and all the world watching you. How much that's involved. The investments you have going. If you lose: that's going to destroy you, and everything you planned, and everything that's involved.

And the man's a good opponent.

You walk into the ring. You hear all these people hootin' and hollerin'. Then you see the cameras and the lights...

I'm really frightened until the first two or three punches.

— Muhammad Ali

Spreadsheets really are the fullest realization we've seen of functional-programming-without-code — with a built-in (rudimentary) database, too. It's no wonder they kicked off the microcomputer era and remain essential to this day.

— Hacker News

Very frequently, the right answer for a MVP is something like an e-mail newsletter, or a Salesforce extension, or a CSV file, or an IDE plug-in, or throwing a pizza party for your target market and performing the service for them yourself.

I've seen startups charge $10K+/month to dump a CSV file on a client's FTP server. Go where the user can most conveniently make use of your product; for a lot of businesses, that is neither app nor website.

— Hacker News

I came up with a brilliant idea for an app, did some research, and found out the same idea has already been launched, promoted, ignored by the world, and killed. Twice. By two different people. It's a massive relief.

Reminder: trying to create an app is almost always a bad idea.

— Tom Scott

David Mamet once said: “Doing a movie or play is like running a marathon. Doing a television show is like running until you die.”

If you’re a NFL quarterback, you watch a lot of games on film, and if you’re a comedy writer you have to watch a lot of game film — you have to watch comedy, read comedy, write about comedy. You have to treat it as seriously as if you’re a law student studying for the bar exam.

Someone said the best ending for a story is at once inevitable and surprising. That it was the only way it could’ve happened, and yet the audience didn’t see it coming. I’d like every episode and every season to end that way.

Staffs should ideally be like the X-Men — lots of different, weird mutants with specific voices and talents. If everyone on your staff is an improv performer from Chicago, or a sci-fi nerd from an Ivy League school, or a stand-up, you’ll only get the specific kind of joke that group provides.

Complacency is a classic mistake. Some people get to a certain point and go, “Okay, I’ve figured it out!” Writing isn’t a thing you figure out — ever. My favorite things I’ve ever written, I hate. That might sound like a weird thing to say. But anything I’ve ever written that I felt was really great, I inevitably will look at it two years later and think, “Oh God, this is so amateurish and terrible.” But that’s a good thing. If you ever feel like you’ve solved anything in writing, you’re just setting yourself up for a huge fall — and you’re wrong. Because it’s not math or science; it’s a weird, nebulous, hard-to-define thing.

— Mike Schur, from Poking a Dead Frog

What I've told people is to imagine a world where muscle is "it".

Muscle is The Answer. Muscle is enlightenment. Muscle is what deep down every person strives for. So in that world, there are those that realize muscle is the answer, and they've found it.

So they write books about the wonders of muscle. They gives lectures, and teachings, and write books about what muscle does and how/why it is the answer: Be Here Muscle! Just Be Muscle! Muscle Now! The Way of Muscle!

But hardly any of these books and teachings say: Go to the gym, pick up a ten pound weight. Do 15 reps, 3 sets. They all just simply say something along the lines of: Be Muscle! Positive Thinking for Muscle!

What I've found in meditation is so much of what we read about being present, about non-duality, about being calm, about "positive" thinking, etc. Those are all the results, or can be the results, of putting the time in.

The gym analogy also works in regards to daily practice. If I just sit down and let my mind go about its way as it normally does throughout the day, I have to ask myself: "Just exactly what am I doing? Why am I doing this?"

It'd be like going to the gym and just kind of meandering around. Maybe picking up a one pound weight, picking my nose, sitting on a machine, and not really pushing. Just being there for an hour and saying: "I did it!"

Meditation -- just like going to the gym -- takes focus, direction, commitment, and honesty with yourself.

— Reddit

A great take on Game of Thrones...

This isn't a story that ends with Happily Ever After. That is where we started.

This whole series is the sequel to a book never written. A classic fantasy, about heroes who fought against an unambiguous evil, about people who took their lives and their honor into their own hands and stormed the gates of the mad king. The brave hero became king and married a beautiful woman, his friend and comrade returned home to raise his family in happiness in the keep of his forefathers, and they all lived Happily Ever After.

But the brave hero doesn't know how to rule, and the beautiful woman he married isn't just a trophy for being a legendary hero...

Last time Happily Ever After happened, it fell apart. Because in reality, there is no end of the story. There's just a point where the author stops writing. And if he writes long enough, everyone ends up dead. Happily Ever After is something that has never happened in real life. This isn't a story, it's a snapshot.

— Reddit

I would say the people who are the most confident self-identifying as data scientists are almost unilaterally frauds. They are not people that you would voluntarily spend a lot of time with. There are a lot of people in this category that have only been exposed to a little bit of real stuff — they’re sort of peripheral...

The issue is that no person with a PhD in AI starts one of these companies, because if you get a PhD in AI, you’ve spent years building a bunch of really shitty models, or you see robots fall over again, and again, and again. You become so acutely aware of the limitations of what you’re doing that the interest just gets beaten out of you. You would never go and say, “Oh yeah, I know the secret to building human-level AI.”

That feels to me like the magic of AI marketing: you label something as AI and it sounds impressive, but under the hood it’s Naive Bayes — it’s whatever the simplest thing you can get up and running. And there's a mysticism around the difficulty of the technology, even though the simplest thing gets you most of the way there.

— An Interview with an Anonymous Data Scientist

The principle is simple and must be engraved deeply in your mind: the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character — the first transformation on the way to mastery.

You enter a career as an outsider. You are naive and full of misconceptions about this new world. Your head is full of dreams and fantasies about the future. Your knowledge of the world is subjective, based on emotions, insecurities, and limited experience.

Slowly, you will ground yourself in reality, in the objective world represented by the knowledge and skills that make people successful in it. You will learn how to work with others and handle criticism. In the process you will transform yourself from someone who is impatient and scattered into someone who is disciplined and focused, with a mind that can handle complexity.

— Mastery

Getting from this first prototype to final game was a process of following what worked, and not being attached to elements that weren’t panning out. An important part of this process was showing my work to colleagues that weren’t afraid to be critical, as I lose objectivity quickly when working alone. It takes a certain kind of grit to ask for feedback at the very beginning of a project but it’s invaluable. In my case with Campfire Cooking the early feedback highlighted that I’d missed the mark with the visual style. I scrapped the darkness and slowly injected more colour into the game.

People are sometimes surprised at the games I create solo when they only see the final product. In reality each game I make is the product of many, many, many incremental improvements on repeated failures. It’s pretty much impossible to get something right the first time, or the second, third or fourth time. You have to be mercilessly objective about your own work and be willing to throw away ideas that aren’t working, or pick apart ones that have potential but also have problems. Re-engineer them, use different parts, try a different coat of paint… is the idea working now?

— Layton Hawkes

People don't want to be using your app. They want to be done using your app.

— Henrik Joreteg

People who ask about health supplements and don't floss...

If you don't have the discipline to floss your teeth twice a day (which has been proven beyond any doubt to be worthwhile, not only in terms of dental hygiene, but also in terms of inflammation and heart health), then how do you expect to suddenly develop the discipline to take four pills three times a day to see a small benefit?

— Alwyn Cosgrove

I learned a lesson: it was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances.

— Steve Martin, Born Standing Up

Recently finished reading Checklist Manifesto, and thought this excerpt was great:

Some years ago Geoff Smart, a PhD psychologist who was then at Claremont Graduate University, conducted a revealing research project. He studied fifty-one venture capitalists, people who make gutsy, high-risk, multimillion-dollar investments in unproven start-up companies. Their work is quite unlike that of money managers, who invest in established companies with track records and public financial statements one can analyze...

Then there were investors Smart called Airline Captains. They took a methodical, checklist-driven approach to their task. Studying past mistakes and lessons from others in the field, they built formal checks into their process. They forced themselves to be disciplined and not to skip steps, even when they found someone they “knew” intuitively was a real prospect.

Smart tracked their success over time. There was no question which style was the most effective — and by now you should be able to guess which one: the Airline Captain. Those taking the checklist-driven approach had a 10% likelihood of later having to fire senior management for incompetence or concluding that their original evaluation was inaccurate. The others had at least a 50% likelihood.

The Airline Captains had a median 80% return on investments studied, the others had 35% or less… The most interesting discovery was that, despite the disadvantages, most investors were either Art Critics or Sponges — intuitive decision makers instead of systematic analysts. Only one in eight took the Airline Captain approach. Smart published his findings more than a decade ago. When I asked him, now that the knowledge is out, whether the proportion of major investors taking the more orderly, checklist-driven approach has increased substantially, he could only report: "No. It’s the same."

We don’t like checklists. They can be painstaking. They’re not much fun. But I don’t think the issue here is mere laziness. There’s something deeper, more visceral going on when people ask away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us — those we aspire to be — handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocols and checklists... Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating.

How many seconds are there in a lifetime? 10^9 seconds

A second is an arbitrary time unit, but one that is based on our experience. Our visual system is bombarded by snapshots at a rate of around 3 per second caused by rapid eye movements called saccades. Athletes often win or lose a race by a fraction of a second. If you earned a dollar for every second in your life you would be a billionaire. However, a second can feel like a minute in front of an audience and a quiet weekend can disappear in a flash. As a child, a summer seemed to last forever, but as an adult, summer is over almost before it begins. William James speculated that subjective time was measured in novel experiences, which become rarer as you get older. Perhaps life is lived on a logarithmic time scale, compressed toward the end.

— Terrence Sejnowski, Powers of Ten

I have always said that people are experience-rich and theory-poor, and that they have these lives that are dense with really interesting experiences. Things happen to us. Now more than ever, we’re exposed, we travel. We have these jobs that are involving and fascinating. What we lack is some way of making sense of all that.

— Malcolm Gladwell

Our greatest PR coup was a two-part one. We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5,000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1,000 users we had 20% of the online store market.

This was roughly true. We really did have the biggest share of the online store market, and 5,000 was our best guess at its size. But the way the story appeared in the press sounded a lot more definite. Reporters like definitive statements.

— The Submarine

Over Thanksgiving dinner, Saul Griffith was complaining about the lack of mathematical literacy among people who should know better. "Take all that talk about the exponential growth of various web sites. Don't people realize that those curves are actually sigmoidal?"

And of course, he’s right. These curves look exponential but eventually they do flatten out. In fact, one of the most important sigmoidal functions is the logistic function, originally developed to model the growth of populations.

Wikipedia notes: "The initial stage of growth is approximately exponential; then, as saturation begins, the growth slows, and at maturity, growth stops." In fact, most of these curves aren't even sigmoidal, they are sinusoidal. (This is, incidentally, why Ray Kurzweil is most likely wrong about the singularity.)

— O'Reilly

Originally written in 1953, but as relevant to software development as anything I've come across:

An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: It is simple. It is small. It is cheap. It is light. It can be built very quickly. It is very flexible in purpose ("omnibus reactor"). Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: It is being built now. It is behind schedule. It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. It is very expensive. It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. It is large. It is heavy. It is complicated.

The tools of the academic-reactor designer are a piece of paper and a pencil with an eraser. If a mistake is made, it can always be erased and changed. If the practical-reactor designer errs, he wears the mistake around his neck; it cannot be erased. Everyone can see it.

— H.G. Rickover

Take a few minutes to ponder the ramifications; the food we eat may literally be making us dumber. And yes, food is a major pesticide source despite what industry might claim... The most important enzyme responsible for breaking down these pesticides in the human body is called serum paraoxanase. Some people have a lot of paraoxanase activity and are able to break down the pesticides really fast. Guess which subpopulation scientists are beginning to find has significantly reduced paraoxanase activity? People with autism.

— Reddit

It is not even so simple, though, as to say that the "correct" way of playing is the one that wins most often, for only the dourest of Gradgrinds would claim that success is measured merely in points and trophies; there must also be room for romance. That tension — between beauty and cynicism, between what Brazilians call futebol d'arte and futebol de resultados — is a constant, perhaps because it is so fundamental, not merely to sport, but also to life: to win, or to play the game well? It is hard to think of any significant actions that are not in some way a negotiation between the two extremes of pragmatism and idealism.

— Inverting the Pyramid