Do you wonder why we obsess about categories and labels for things? It goes back to Plato, Aristotle and the birth of Western philosophy. They pioneered ways to use language to understand the world, b
2020 was my second year as an “independent researcher.” I’m grateful for the freedom that strange job title entails, but it’s certainly not well-defined. I’ve needed to grope around in the dark for pa
The first time I heard about blockchains was at a party where a friend of mine spent the night talking my ear off about this thing called Bitcoin and why I ought to buy some. I suspect that many other
By the time he stepped onto a bus in downtown Toronto for the first leg of a trip to Lake Tahoe in December 2012, Geoff Hinton hadn’t taken a seat for seven years. “I last sat down in 2005,” he often
We use a pattern called Now, Next, Thinking About to communicate our product strategy to our internal stakeholders. The gist is that it’s our way to communicate a “roadmap” that stays as close to the
Thank you for coming, we hate you. Last week, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Jack Dorsey were once again dragged before Congress to be told by a handful of career politicians “we honestly just do
I’ve been thinking about the idea of potential lately, especially in the sense of the phrase “technological potential” as applied to say countries, growth sectors, trends, and charismatic engineering
We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem. Russel L. Ackoff In case you were wondering, those are ducks on the table. The facili
In mid-January 2021 , at the height of the COVID-19 vaccination craze in Texas, it was impossible to get jabbed. The website for vaccine scheduling in my area was hastily built, crashed constantly, an
Why multisigs are the future of online accounts This essay is the first in a Gnosis Guild series by @keikreutler bridging cryptonetworks, web3, and gaming. To kick the series off, we invite collective
It was Patrick Collison, Stripe’s CEO, who pointed out to me that one of the animating principles of early 20th-century Progressivism was guaranteeing freedom of expression from corporations : If you
Coordinate system that is defined by points instead of vectors Not to be confused with Barycentric coordinates (astronomy) . See also: Affine space § Barycentric coordinates A 3-simplex, with barycent
You could not say a word and still be thought a great conversationalist, so long as your interlocutor ends up doing the kind of talking they like to do. That’s what it means to be good at conversation
Conor ( @Conaw ) pointed me to Excalidraw last week, and I was blown away by the tool and especially about the opportunities it opens up for Roam Research ! It is a full-featured, embeddable sketching
By Pascal Hitzler Communications of the ACM,February 2021,Vol. 64 No. 2, Pages 76-83 10.1145/3397512 Credit: Andrij Borys Associates, Shutterstock Let us begin this review by defining the subject matt
Updates (Feb. 14, 2021): Scott Alexander Siskind responds here . Last night, it occurred to me that despite how disjointed it feels, the New York Times piece does have a central thesis: namely, that r
Twitter’s addicting. It’s not a good use of my time, but I scroll there anyway. If I’m going to be scrolling there anyway, might as well make it worthwhile. So, I’ve decided to repurpose my Twitter ti
Using the Roam JavaScript primitives I wrote yesterday it was extremely easy (less than 10 minutes, I think) to create a robust Browserflow flow for saving URLs to Roam Research. Now when I’m browsing
Credit... Illustrations by Jon Reinfurt Silicon Valley’s Safe Space Slate Star Codex was a window into the psyche of many tech leaders building our collective future. Then it disappeared. Credit... Il
This is a cross-post from my personal blog . You might enjoy it if you're interested in progress studies or intellectual history. The Italian Renaissance, like nearly every other time and place, is a
Published in Science and Philosophy · 9 min read · Dec 18, 2020 -- [image: René Descartes, right, with Queen Christina of Sweden, Wikimedia Commons] Back in 1995, fresh off my postdoc year at Brown Un
The advantages and pitfalls of common distance measures Published in Towards Data Science · 10 min read · Feb 1, 2021 -- Distance Measures. Image by the author. Many algorithms, whether supervised or
Like you and me, Brian Eno has spent way too much time on Zoom lately. But unlike us, he’s taking steps to create a better solution to group video communication. “I’m working on a project with some Du
I. I am not defending technocracy. Nobody ever defends technocracy. It's like "elitism" or "statism". There is no Statist Party. Nobody holds rallies demanding more statism. There is no Citizens for S
I hang out around a lot of effective altruists . Many of them are motivated primarily by something like guilt (for having great resource and opportunity while others suffer) or shame (for not helping
People like to say the life-changing moment is the one like what Amanda Gorman experienced yesterday. Up on stage, with the eyes of a nation on her. She stepped up to the mic. Prepared. Ready. And she
If, on a certain evening about sixty-six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched
Quick Links Split View on iPad is great when you want to run two apps side-by-side. But adding a second app can be convoluted unless you're using the tablet with a keyboard. Here's how to quickly open
Facebook/Twitter Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman. encoding="utf-8" ? Eugene Goodman is a United States Capitol Police officer who is being hailed as a hero for luring a mob of protesters away fr
5 min read · Nov 10, 2020 -- You may have seen something going around in the wake of the 2020 US Presidential Election where people are claiming they can prove there was fraud in the votes using math.
Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz - Utilitarianism for engineers [ entries | archive | friends | userinfo ] Scott [ userinfo | livejournal userinfo ] [ archive | journal archive ] Utilitarianism f
Epicurean philosophy, which developed around 300 BC in ancient Greece, holds that the art of happiness consists in a life of ethical hedonism. Matthew McConaughey’s recent memoir, Greenlights , also a
In February 1990, I published the Technical Report FKI-126-90 (revised in November)which introduced several concepts that have become popular in the field of Machine Learning. The report described a s
Excerpt from M. C. Escher, Metamorphosis III (1968) December 2020 Contents This guide and its embedded spaced repetition system were made possible by a crowd-funded research grant from my Patreon comm
1 INTRODUCTION Concepts are mental representations of a special kind. While some mental representations are constitutively creatures of perception, language, action, or other domain‐specific systems,
One of my favorite things about Drafts is its quick adoption of the new OS features that come year-over-year. Not only are they quickly adopted, but they are well implemented, carefully considered, an
And yeah, he always had “that look…” That way of staring straight through you into some faraway, unknowable beyond. It was there when I first saw him, but nothing compared to what he looked like when
John F. Sowa Abstract. Informally, sentences in different languages may mean“the same thing.” Formally, that “thing,” calleda proposition , represents abstract, language-independent,semantic content.
Big Idea: This article is intended to help others understand and implement my flavor of the Roamkasten PKM system. I consume a lot of non-fiction texts and academic articles to formulate a coherent an
Big ideas. Once a week. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter. A leading British space scientist thinks there is life under the ice sheets of Europa. Paul Ratner 03 May, 2020 Jupiter's moon Europa has a