August 2023: Translations, Junk Time, Mid LLMs

What I Did This Month

• Wrote a lot. Published History Is Written by the Translator, Reclaiming Your Junk Time, and LLMs are mid (but that’s ok).

• For PostHog, published newsletters on GitHub and GitLab feature flag usage and A/B testing, a blog on writing great product survey questions, and more.

• Improved styling for Iliad Translations and added Peter Green, Anthony Verity, and Ian Johnston. Learned a lot of SQL.

• Did the Grouse Grind twice, watched The Bear and Oppenheimer, went to a Whitecaps game, and ate multiple formats of BBQ.

Thoughts

• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. In novels, there is a balance that needs to be struck between randomness and complexity. The first time I read Blood Meridian, I didn’t fully understand what was going on (it takes time to get into McCarthy’s writing style), thought it was random, senseless violence, and gave up 1/3 of the way. This time, I made it through and realized its deep complexity. Justin Murphy and crew’s analysis helped too. There are seemingly endless interesting ways to analyze it. Modernity, Nietzschean, American, Colonial, Christian, and magical reading are all real and possible.

• The grass is greener where your friends are. For some people unhappy with where they live now, they see moving as the solution. Happiness might come in another place, not because that place is better, but just because their social circle is reset. You get a chance to make new friends. Ones you might fit better with. Travelling as a young person is a short-term version of this.

• Validating a startup is about validating a worldview. Your opportunity is the difference between what you believe and what the world perceives. You can shortcut by writing a blog post that validates that worldview as well. A startup can be seen as a worldview wrapper.

• Getting more people to use AI will reveal humanity's preferences for its alignment. This means one of the best potential AI alignment tasks is teaching people about using AI, helping them understand what it's good at and its limitations. Give them a Fingerspitzengefühl of AI.

• How much of the population of the world lives on land filled in from the sea and lakes? Boston, Netherlands, Singapore, New York, and Dubai all have done it. Why don’t cities (Vancouver) see this as an option?

• Maybe you’ve heard of how the world completely changed in 1971, but have you heard about the massive amounts of protests happening worldwide in 1968?

• Does bad weather make the world more productive? If there is bad weather, you’re forced to stay inside and work. Industrialization enabled this to happen, and the information age accelerated it.

• Why are LLMs good at SEO? Because “SEO” isn't about writing good article, but articles lots of people can find. By being based on writing for "lots of people," it can do a good job copying it.

Recommendations

• Stephen Wolfram on The Joe Walker Podcast. Wolfram is inspiring. Does a 4.5-hour interview because he has the freedom to and it’s a good conversation. Runs a sizeable tech company for 30+ years and doesn’t plan to go public. Continues to do groundbreaking research in many fields. Supports the ambitions of young people. Repeatedly works on projects at the top of humanity’s ambition levels with large time scales. Helps anyone curious by creating massive amounts of informative content online, doing streams and AMAs all the time.

• When coding, I usually use a combination of Copilot and ChatGPT. Often this requires copying and pasting context for them. Cursor is a VS Code based editor with generation, context, and chat built in. It’s working well so far, see a demo video.

• Textbelt is an open source API to send text messages, extremely simple, and literally works by sending texts as emails to every service provider, which gets rendered for receivers as texts.

• What the humans like is responsiveness and 100 things I know. A lot of being a good person is being responsive, attentive, and thoughtful over the long term. Give people your focus and you will get rewarded.

• How do you go from 0 to 1.5M followers on Twitter in a year? Spend ~8 hours per day writing threads like The Cultural Tutor did.

• You Should Be Working On Hardware. Simply put, hardware (compared to software) is an inefficient market. The most admired entrepreneur on the planet isn’t a SaaS founder, but a multi-time hardware one (Elon).

• Organizations are powered by spirit, and there are more ways to invigorate the spirit than just making money. Brunello Cucinelli is an example of this, and he channels history for many more examples. Founders Podcast episode on him is also excellent.

• There are a massive number of software engineering blogs out there, many support by the top software engineering organizations. Most of them are not well written, but they are extremely informative if you’re willing to find the right information and do the work. diff.blog is a good way to find them.

• Reading list for a new city. Search university professors on YouTube for better content. Hemingway reading list. Mike Mentzer high intensity training philosophy. Don’t get distracted by good ideas. Walk around. Iterate, cultivate taste, solve for distribution, and get good at managing your psychology. You don’t need a government project for AI. The world belongs to the energetic.

• Fishpond mosaic. Historical Chipotle. Chimp plays Minecraft. Milk is good. America vs Radiohead. How to screw over the oligarchs. The sun will continue to shine. Cringe is in. Business is a wrapper of aesthetic taste.

Upcoming

• Working on my coding skills. Learning TypeScript, reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications. Upgrading Iliad Translations style. Writing small scripts to automate stuff and work with LLMs.

• Writing. Working on articles about AI alignment, validating startups with blogs, and learning to code.