🎯 | ☕

I did not have the time to write a short letter, so I did not really write one

PD: the title should have been Phronemophobia: the fear of thinking.

It is a prevalent problem nowadays. Only by thinking, we can make more with less, and that may be the only way out of stagflation.

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“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.” — Winston Churchill

☕ “Brute force is enough.”

“…all models are approximations. Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. However, the approximate nature of the model must always be borne in mind…” — George Box

☕ Start with something simplistic. Fix it with epicycles. As fast as possible.

“There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.” — C. A. R. Hoare

☕ Asymmetric lotteries may be good when the upside greatly outweighs the downside.

🎯 Do not be a lottery ticket for someone else.

trylks @trylks

@FirstThePain @jackbutcher Complicate to understand Understand to simplify

James Clear @JamesClear

Simplicity before understanding complexity is ignorance. Simplicity after understanding complexity is genius.

trylks @trylks

@Grady_Booch @fchollet Explore vs exploit applies to approx. everything 🎯 Exploit: fragile, efficient, fixed,… 🗺️ Explore: anti-fragile, ergodic, growth,… Disclaimers: 🤔 Explore in the fastest way, sometimes that's thinking 🧭 Theory needed to guide exploration: direction vs speed

trylks @trylks

If you can shoot everywhere: you don't need to aim Larger search spaces: more strategic exploration More shooting: greater false positive (FP) risk Incentives situation today: shooting is cheap, and FPs result in your success and someone else's problems

read.deeplearning.aiHow to Build AI Products and Businesses: Two StrategiesBuilding AI products and businesses requires making tough choices about what to build and how to go about it. I’ve heard of two styles: Ready, Aim, Fire

François Chollet @fchollet

Developing a measure of progress towards your goal should make you better understand your goal and the problem you're solving. But picking the wrong measure makes you understand your problem *less*. It makes you less likely to achieve your initial goal.

trylks @trylks

@fchollet If you try to do that you are led to a conception of success, which is self-reinforcing, because you do get success in terms of this conception, but it's very different from what's done in the sciences

theatlantic.comNoam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went WrongAn extended conversation with the legendary linguist

François Chollet @fchollet

This is a joke, but it's also not. You know there *will* be benchmarks for joke understanding, and LLMs *will* get superhuman on them. This in itself will be a masterpiece of absurdist humor -- like many other facets of modern deep learning.

François Chollet @fchollet

Soon, the field of ML will come up with a benchmark for joke understanding. "If a LLM can explain the following 2,500 jokes, then it has solved the problem of humor." Then by 2024 a 300B parameter model will achieve superhuman humor levels.

trylks @trylks

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” — Henry David Thoreau As stagflation settles, we need to exchange more of our lives to get less. At the core this is an inefficiency problem, when transforming effort into wellbeing.

sigmoid.substack.comThe management bubbleReminder: The everything bubble includes everything

Mirage — Photo by Renè Müller on Unsplash