Tis’ the season to be thankful →

Published January 1, 2023  ·  All posts on Jan 1  ·  

Thank you for reading! I appreciate your time and attention, and I don’t take it for granted.

In years past I’ve posted some links to things which I pay for—if I’m not paying for something, then I’m probably the product being sold. So I prefer to pay for things when I can (when I’m able and when paying directly is possible.) Here are few things I use, which I pay for: Hindenburg, Overcast, Reeder, Feedbin, Tower, Transmit, OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, iaWriter, Discourse, Basecamp, Bluehost, Hover, Zencastr, Zoom, Otter, Mailchimp, Substack, Supercast, and Front.

ɕ

The quality of your mind →

Published December 31, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 31  ·  ,

You determine the quality of your mind by the nature of your daily thoughts. If they circle around the same obsessions and dramas, you create an arid and monotonous mental landscape, and this secretly makes you miserable. Instead, you must seek to radiate your mind outward, to unleash your imagination and intensify your experience of life. […] You are in fact surrounded every day by endless marvels, and to the degree you let them into your daily consciousness, you expand your mind and reinvigorate its immense powers.

~ Robert Greene

slip:4a1061.

Average, or worst? →

Published December 30, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 30  ·  ,

Over the last few years, deep-learning-based AI has progressed extremely rapidly in fields like natural language processing and image generation. However, self-driving cars seem stuck in perpetual beta mode, and aggressive predictions there have repeatedly been disappointing. Google’s self-driving project started four years before AlexNet kicked off the deep learning revolution, and it still isn’t deployed at large scale, thirteen years later. Why are these fields getting such different results?

~ Alyssa Vance from, Humans are very reliable agents

slip:4ulepo2.

This makes the interesting distinction between average–case performance, and worst–case performance. People are really good by both measures (click through to see what that means via Fermi approximations.) AI (true AI, autonomous driving systems, language models like GPT-3, etc.) is getting really good on average cases. But it’s the worst–case situations where humans perform reasonably well… and current AI fails spectacularly.

ɕ

Conversation →

Published December 29, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 29  ·  , ,

We—mankind—are a conversation.

~ Martin Heidegger

slip:4a1059.

Kino Lorber →

Published December 28, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 28  ·  ,

Go to this YouTube channel: Kino Lorber, click Playlists and then view the Free Documentaries (80 feature-length films) or the Free Movies on Demand playlist (145 films.) Kino Lorber is an international film distribution company; I thought it was a person when I first heard mention of this.

Now try this experiment: Pick a documentary (try Filmworker if you know who Stanley Kubrick is, M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity if you have eyes, or Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil if painting is more your thing.) Watch the movie. Then reflect on the experience of watching a feature–length documentary, versus say, modern “serial” shows. I’ve relearned just how bad modern entertainment can be, when I reminded myself just how good film can be. (Surprise bonus-round: Watch The Atomic Café and be gobsmacked, horrified, and… some-other-feeling-I-can’t-quite-find-the-right-word-for in repeated cycles.)

ɕ

Sunset →

Published December 27, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 27  ·  ,

Every time you wake up and ask yourself, “What good things am I going to do today?” remember that, when the sun goes down at sunset, it will take a part of you life with it.

~ Indian proverb

slip:4a1058.

Take some time to reflect →

Published December 26, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 26  ·  

On your deathbed, you would do anything, pay anything for one more ordinary evening. For one more car ride to school with your children. For one more juicy peach. For one more hour on a park bench. Yet here you are, experiencing any number of those things, and rushing through it. Or brushing it off. Or complaining about it because it’s hot or there is traffic or because of some alert that just popped up on your phone. Or planning some special thing in the future as if that’s what will make you happy. You can’t add more at the end of your life…but you can not waste what’s in front of you right now.

~ Ryan Holiday from, 35 Lessons on the Way to 35 Years Old

slip:4uryle1.

This blog started initially as a place for me to post a eulogy, and then it grew to serve many more purposes. It’s now solidly a way for me to reflect, and to work with the garage door up. Discovery, reflection, and efficacy are pretty frickin’ important to me and keeping up with the ‘ol bloggin’ forces me to keep up with daily discovery and reflection. I’ve a bunch of other processes beyond this blog.

It’s a rare post where I both have a point and state it explicitly: Whether you go off to Holiday’s article and follow that thread, follow my links in this email or this post, or my series teaching daily reflection matters not. It only matters that you take time to reflect.

ɕ

December 25, 2022 — #12 →

Published December 25, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 25  ·  

Reading time: About 4 minutes, 900 words
Get 7 for Sunday in your inbox. → Subscribe here.
This issue is https://7forsunday.com/12

Wow! Still, wow. →

Published December 25, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 25  ·  

Almost fifty years after it was detected, the Wow! Signal continues to tantalize and defy explanation. […] In 2020, interest in this candidate [extra-terrestrial intelligence] signal was revitalized when Cabellaro identified a Sun-like star in the vicinity of the sky where the Wow! Signal was detected. If the analysis is correct, this famous signal may have come from a Sun-like star located 1,800 light-years away.

~ Matt Williams from, There Could Be Four Hostile Civilizations in the Milky Way

slip:4uuite1.

More amazing is that actual progress continues to be made towards understanding the original signal’s origin. Fifty years ago, the area of the sky was known to contain a bunch of stars. Today? We know which of them have planets. …and which of those stars have a planet in the so-called habitable zone. The article is both a good introduction to the famous (among astronomy enthusiasts) signal and a good story about continued research.

And just ignore the article’s click–bait title, which comes from a tangential discussion about whether we should only listen for extraterrestrial intelligence or actually try to contact ET.

ɕ

“Important” work →

Published December 24, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 24  ·  ,

Nothing really belongs to us but time, which even he has who has nothing else. It is equally unfortunate to waste your precious life in mechanical tasks or in a profusion of important work.

~ Baltasar Gracián

slip:4a1057.