My Favorite Links

Now that we are entering a world where most of what we consume is no longer produced by humans, we must be more aware of the consequences of the things we ingest. Unfortunately, there is a catch-22 when it comes to content consumption: Much like the neolithic hunter-gatherers of our past, trying each berry to determine its lethality, we must still read/view/hear at least some portion of content before determining its value and potential impact on us.

There are hundreds if not thousands of external ideas and influences that bubble up into my consciousness every day. I can’t even pass a traffic light without being consumed by them.

I like to think of this list below as a sampling of some of my favorite berries that have influenced me over the course of my personal life and professional career. You’ll notice this is conspicuously devoid of movies, videos, and books. All 3 are exceptionally influential media, but there are thousands of other posts on those, so I focused this solely on posts I have run into on the internet since I realized you could do more on here than just watch music videos.

There is no speed limit - I spent almost the entirety of my last year of undergrad stuck in a rut. I felt like I was in garbage time, running out the clock so I could get on with my life. Sivers’ essay reminded me that I didn’t have to work on anyone else’s schedule. This realization led to me finishing my undergraduate degree in 3 years, finishing my masters in 1, and a re-ignition in my desire to move at my own pace.

Many smart people are trained to ask permission and work within a system. That doesn’t have to be the case.

How to Ask Your Mentors for Help - I have dozens of mentors. Very few even know I exist. Yet they have each had a profound impact on my life. Some convinced me to appreciate the intricacies of the grind, even when I was stuck in frustrating grocery lines or bored out of my mind at a dull job. Some showed me the first steps to taking control of my finances and creating a personality I would like to be around.

More than half the battle is asking yourself the right questions.

The gospel of /u/ryans01 and Fire & Motion - Every person I know has gotten “stuck” at least once in their life. I have gotten stuck a few times myself. The philosophy of consistent momentum has gotten me unstuck when I really needed it. Compounding is seriously useful (in many cases).

They’re Made out of Meat and This is Water and The Egg - Anytime I can feel myself taking life too seriously or disliking the people around me, these find a way to pop back into my life. It’s so easy to fall into the routine of frustration and dissatisfaction, and it’s so hard to realize that your life is made up of what you do on the days in it.

Social Media is a Huge Vat of Brains - While the message of the post suffers from the “if everyone just” fallacy, the idea of watching your digital intake as if you were plugging into a hivemind has stuck with me for years. There seems to be an open problem that you have to ingest some amount of content before determining whether or not it is good for you. If that content is hazardous enough, it can permanently wreck you before you even know what hit you. Someone finding a way to solve this will likely make the world a better place.

How to Make Wealth - A family friend introduced Paul Graham’s essays to me right when I was entering the workforce. I now routinely recommend them to anyone who will listen.

I actually tend to use this one as evidence for the benefits of capitalism as a coordination system, even though it is clearly a call to create a startup at its core. I find the message very close to those produced by Naval and love the idea of positive-sum wealth creation, though I can understand how some might say it doesn’t exist in the same way anymore.

How to Speak - I am breaking my own rule on no videos and giving away my secret sauce with this one, but it is something that I think is memetically cooperative, so it is worth it. I would love it if we all adopted this style of presentation when it came to introducing ideas especially in big tech.

The Bouba/Kiki Effect - This one can actually be turned into a fun (if nerdy) party game! Have your text-to-image generator build a bunch of bouba and kiki images then show them one at a time, asking everyone to vote whether the image is bouba or kiki. You’ll be surprised how reliable people are at guessing which image belongs to which camp.

I love posts like these because they take two wholly fascinating ideas in their own right and combine them together to form something even more interesting. A lot of my favorite posts do something similar to this.

Career Decisions - This one helped me rationalize my decision when deciding to move to the bay from LA. It is very thought-provoking at the meta-layer as well: What are you optimizing for every day? Is it in line with what you proclaim you want? If not, what are the biggest levers you can change to get there?

The Tail End - I do a lot of things that don’t make sense unless you have read this. A good example of this is “balling out” on trips when I visit friends and family: I see my mom about 3-4 times per year. If neither one of us moves, given her current age and family medical history, optimistically, I only have ~90 chances left to make memories with her that will last for the rest of my life. When you think about it like that, it is hard to convince yourself not to do the thing, even if it is out of the way or expensive.

Don’t Call Yourself a Programmer - You solve problems. I wish I had internalized this earlier, instead of attempting to brand myself as any one role title.

There is a section near the bottom which points out,

“At the end of the day, your life happiness will not be dominated by your career.”

This kind of thing felt meaningless to me when I first read it. Of course all the other parts of life matter. But there are entire organizations built on convincing you that nothing matters but your output. Spending all your time at work is seductive and easy, especially if you are good at what you do. But very few people have their accomplishments listed on their tombstone.

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule - I couldn’t stand meetings for the first few years of my career. It felt like they broke up my flow and it would take me hours to recover from a string of 30 minute meetings. I couldn’t understand why my superiors would book 8 meetings in a day, then expect any work to get done until I realized that was their work. From where they sat, the highest leverage thing they could do was pass along alignment and information.

But that didn’t mean that I had to. This essay showed me that I wasn’t alone in feeling like I did. It demonstrated that something could be done about it. Even though Graham’s strategy works mostly because he is Paul Graham, the underlying truth that a Maker works in half-day units has done wonders for my own scheduling. I now try to block out either the first or second half of the day for focus work and will often turn my notifications off during that time to really get in the flow.

Forward Pass - Of course Karpathy had to show up somewhere. This is actually very close to how I naively think about model consciousness. We are considered unconscious/brain-dead when there is not any activity in our brains, so to me it would be a fair comparison that models would only be truly conscious while the forward or backward passes are actively running on GPUs.

Since each conversation activates different parameters in different ways, each instance could be thought of as its own being, all under the collective family of the same weights akin to our gene similarity marking us as family members. When the pass stops, the model is in a state of suspended animation where it truly “dies” at the end of its context window. It makes me wonder if the “end-conversation” tool that Claude employs is really a “this conversation is so bad, I would rather end my life early” button.

“the sunk cost fallacy is not real because every choice you make changes you. by standing in line for two hours you become a different man, one who’s identity is tied to reaching the front” - Roon - There are many longer pieces which echo this idea, but this succinctly establishes the reason for so much of the illogical behavior we see in the world. I have worked on a couple projects over the years that were essentially DOA, but couldn’t for the life of me understand why there was so much commitment to keeping them going. If I had taken a step back and thought through this, I would have realized that the details of the projects were irrelevant.

How to Write Usefully - This is the bar I attempt to set for my writing, though I admittedly don’t always reach it. I carry that mental checklist of

True?
Novel?
Important?

as my last stop before committing to a piece.

For a long time, this actually prevented me from writing anything! I thought, “sure the stuff I have to write is correct, but is it something that isn’t obvious to everyone?” The problem with this thought process is that there is no way to know what is obvious to other people. It only takes a few posts for you to realize that the mode of your posts’ reach is basically just yourself, so you really are the audience you are writing for.

Visual Information Theory - An excellent resource for information theory. This blog has one of the best explainers on cross-entropy I have ever seen. I consider this the cleanest example of approachable writing for complex topics.

The Scaling Hypothesis - To avoid turning this post into a Gwern fan-page, I have limited the links to his most famous contribution. There is a section in the appendix, labeled “It from Byte”, that was my first introduction to the idea that agents could be created just from ingesting text about agency. That section was when it really clicked for me that GPT-style prediction could actually result in some form of intelligence.

Crony Beliefs - Every day each of us hears some scissor statement that sounds utterly deranged. The worst offenses to me are those whose own arguments contain blatant logical inconsistencies. In every case, I couldn’t understand how they could hold these beliefs so strongly when they were clearly hypocritical. But this post demonstrated a much more enlightened take on those flammable, tightly guarded ideas. If more people understood that beliefs function as tools for things other than an accurate model of the world, the world would be a better place.

Meditations on Moloch - This should be required reading if you work on capabilities. It made me feel like a “race to the bottom” was inevitable when I first read it, but I have come around to the idea that discussing these multipolar traps is the only way to avoid them.

Writes and Write-Nots - Paul Graham shows up more than any other writer on this list for a reason. In a time when more and more of our lives are outsourced to machines, what should we choose to keep? The idea that writing fleshes out thinking has goaded me into writing more about topics that I wish to understand in addition to just sharing my opinions.

Create - I ran into Create back in 2024 when I was really struggling to figure out what I wanted to do after leaving TikTok. It led to me attempting to launch my own single-person company and eventually got me over the tipping point when it came to releasing apps and posting in general.

The Gentle Romance - The whole collection of short stories is fantastic, but I am very fond of the titular idea. There is not a lot of writing on good outcomes from a singularity, but if it looks like this I would not be mad. Something that I would love to see is more stories in this vein.

An interesting takeoff scenario I read recently was The Machine Starts. I loved the way he played with the ideas of purpose for humans especially as it changes over the course of generations.

Verifiability - While this article wasn’t the first one to point this out, verifiability has seen the conquest of open conjectures, front-end design work, rote analytics, and many other domains. Humans seem to be grasping for things to do along that jagged edge of difficult to verify tasks (though some of this is obviously makework).

Many domains are filled with hard to verify outputs that require human oversight to confirm or deny. In my own experience with Data Science, I am seeing it become something of a compliance role, set up only to confirm whether the swarm has created something accurate or not. Over time, this long tail of verifiable tasks can likely be post-trained directly into the models, leaving little for the human to do.

Compliance is of little interest to me, as the best parts of Data Science were always the combination of creativity and math. If you find yourself in a similar position, don’t be afraid to follow your interests!

A Big Little Idea Called Legibility - Don’t read this if you work in big tech. You will see it everywhere and go insane.

Gyre - I don’t think I have figured this one out. I get what is happening, but my idea of the underlying message changes every time I read it.

Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail - This is also a great case against fast takeoff scenarios. AGI/ASI assumes some superintelligence can master all the intricacies of performing any number of jobs, but there are some things that only practitioners know. If we end up in an RL-dominant regime for advancing past our current levels, then we should expect slower takeoffs as all of those intricacies need to show up in some subset of the training curriculum before models will be able to handle them.

Honorable Mentions

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” - Heraclitus