both of which impress people

But any energy that goes into how you seem comes out of being good. That's one reason nerds have an advantage in doing great work: they expend little effort on seeming anything. In fact that's basically the definition of a nerd.

make something that people will care about in a hundred years

being good is simply too vague a standard

The perfect setup is an office you work in and that you walk to and from.

When you're procrastinating in units of years

lot not done

Per-project procrastination is far the more dangerous

[7]

Try to finish what you start

I often trick myself by saying "I'll just read over what I've got so far." Five minutes later I've found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, and I'm off.

technique to working,

You don't just put out your sail and get blown forward by inspiration.

The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance.

So it does take a good deal of boldness.

One sign that you're suited for some kind of work is when you like even the parts that other people find tedious or frightening.

scrambling diagonally across tracks

assumption that you'll somehow magically guess as a teenager

The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive.

[2]

Which may help explain why people's reaction to a new idea is often the first half of laughing: Ha!

What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people?

Whatever seems to you excitingly ambitious.

Some kinds of work you end up doing may not even exist yet.

[1]

Doing great work means doing something important so well that you expand people's ideas of what's possible

July 2023

But you should always be aiming as close to the center as you can without stallin

And if you think there's something admirable about working too hard, get that idea out of your head. You're not merely getting worse results, but getting them because you're showing off — if not to other people, then to yourself

If great talent and great drive are both rare, then people with both are rare squared.

I wasn't sure of that as a kid. Schoolwork varied in difficulty; one didn't always have to work super hard to do well.

the dangerous risk of provoking an identity reevaluation of himself

where you can have a very high impact with little work. You want high leverage.

Charlie, however, just takes a sip of coconut water, and says “There’s a bug over there because you re-used lastCachedTime. Otherwise, looks good. Ship it!”

monkey-patching in a dynamic proxy to generate a metaclass wildcard

“capability times will” as something else: deterrence

They're as unhappy on the territory of humor as a mounted knight on a skating rink.

Those kind of people reject conventional ideas only to replace them with the most random conspiracy theories.

Computers would be just as happy to be told what to do directly in machine language.

But programming languages are different: programming languages are not just technology, but what programmers think in.

Life becomes a little richer because you pay more attention.

you start to look out for things that make you think, challenge your assumptions, or inspire you.

My spelling at school was terrible, and that psychologically stopped me from learning to write well.

I wasted a lot of this content, doing little or nothing with the ideas I found.

Note that the lightning emoji indicates a blazing fast speed. And the snail emoji indicates slow speed.

I studied entrepreneurship in college. I took business courses in areas like accounting, finance, marketing, lean startups, business scaling, etc. etc. I've read plenty of the books, "The Lean Startup", "Growth Hacking", "Traction", the list goes on. I've listened to thousands of hours of podcasts like Rob Wallings "Start Ups for the Rest of Us" or Sam Parr and Shaan Puri's "My First Million". I've watched YouTube videos for what feels like longer than I've actually been alive when it comes to building a business. I should know this like the back of my hand.

The non-transitioning items still jump around awkwardly — we can fix that in the next chapter.

defer transitions, so that they can be coordinated between multiple elements.

Note that the transition is reversible — if you toggle the checkbox while the transition is ongoing, it transitions from the current point, rather than the beginning or the end.

It feels much like Rust vs. C++. Rather than adding layers upon layers to existing infinitely backwards-compatible software, it takes the best patterns and features and builds them from the ground up. The result is a vastly simpler, faster, leaner, and easier to use stack that's still familiar to users of most popular modern tooling.

If it were true, you would never lose a game of chess (no new information is introduced)

given the information available to you, you know all the conclusions that can be deduced from that information.

while clearly intending the pun

And this starts with being mindful and intentional with our attention.

GPT-3 for Spaced Repetition

Orbit helps you deeply internalize ideas through periodic review.

But if you were to actually make it part of your recurring lifestyle, the benefits would stop, and eventually the impact would work in reverse.

By waking up early you intentionally were fighting against your chronobiology, hence adding an element of acute sleep deprivation regardless of how many hours you got the night before. That mania fuels an amphetamine like focus.

The beaming was at 10:00 a.m.; we were done at 9:00 a.m.

meaning that clearance is not caused by sleep per se, but instead only co-occurrs with it.

They were too busy listening to his keynote at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society 2019 meeting.

Walker falsified a graph from an academic study in the book.

Walker wrote: “Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer”, despite there being no evidence that cancer in general and sleep are related. There are obviously no RCTs on this, and, in fact, there’s not even a correlation between general cancer risk and sleep duration.

upstream cause that results in both undersleeping and lack of productivity.

this is expected as per the analogy to exercise I make above.

just a prospect of playing an exciting video game, makes me 100% alert even after sleeping for 2-3 hours.

Convincing a million 20-year-olds to sleep an unnecessary hour a day is equivalent, in terms of their hours of wakefulness, to killing 62,500 of them.

I used to be really scared of not sleeping enough and almost never set the alarm for less than 7.5 hours after going to bed.

people like Matthew Walker, and making me lose the last remnants of trust in sleep science that I had.

It appears that there is a distinct single-point mutation that allows some people to sleep several hours less than typical on average.

there’s nothing “natural” about sleeping 7-9 hours.

get by

If you want a problem solved make it someone’s project. If you want it managed make it someone’s job.

sleepiness, rather absence of sleep

short-term acute stress response results in adaptation and in long-term increase in performance and in benefit to the organism.

The only thing we observe is that my organism was subjected to acute stress.

being overpowered by a superstimulus while being bored

Does this sound “natural”

The commitment to deliberate prac-tice distinguishes the expert performer from the vast majorityof children and adults who seem to have remarkable difficultymeeting the much lower demands on practice in schools, adulteducation, and in physical exercise programs

sleep deprivation can cause odd mental states including mania and loss of inhibitions

asymmetry

which might also be reproduced in the morning

the incubation effect

“I had a busy day, I can take it easy tonight.”

use up some sort of ‘willpower’ or ‘creativity’

obligations/​​excuses literally cannot come first.

repeatedly ‘accidentally’ find themselves with too little time to write at night

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

disgustingly early like pre-dawn

went for walks in the afternoon, played the gramophone in the evening.

for the prose rhythms of 1611 were not those she was in search of

3–4 hr of writing every morning and to spend the rest of the day on walking, correspondence, napping, and other less demanding activities

‘I don’t know where to put this.’

devs (including me, sometimes) spend absurd amounts of time perfectly doing the wrong thing.

multiplier on everything else you do

Many of the early Rustaceans are refugees from C++

Expressions evaluate to a resulting value. Let’s look at some examples.

Statements are instructions that perform some action and do not return a value

Naming hardcoded values used throughout your program as constants is useful in conveying the meaning of that value to future maintainers of the code

collector’s fallacy

focus on finely honing a small handful of questions and ideas each day from your reading

Introductory Articles

group-brainstorm

Don't brainstorm, since brainstormed ideas are what's easily available, instead of innovative or actually relevant.

people with almost no time or money sometimes do things that don’t seem to make any sense... People facing deadlines sometimes switch frantically between all kinds of tasks. People with little money sometimes spend it on seeming luxuries like take-away food.

that misrepresent the original intent of a video.

music has been by written by Vince Rubinetti

distortions of Ciceronian oratory were explicitly banned from the Royal Society

“to clothe and adorn the obscurity even of philosophy itself with sensible and plausible elocution.”

Better search.

post-scarcity levels

That anyone could consider this to be the computational backbone to the new global internet is beyond laughable.

Usually they take the form of a list of links

experts from Think Tanks saying long, ponderous things in a dull voice

without any individual person needing to personally donate that capital

often at first gradually, then suddenly.

participation

performance

process

fairness

continuity

brute force

coordination games

Pure functions

They hold logic related to the class, rather than to the instance of the class.

Sinofsky is the author of Hardcore Software Inside the Rise and Fall of the PC Revolution, an immense online opus compiled with Benedictine patience and extensive archives. A great read for those who have lived inside the PC revolution, or want to gain a better appreciation for its unfolding.)

If you find yourself lost, remember to keep moving forward. It will all eventually make sense.

The problem is so widespread that people pretending to be eminent do it by pretending to be overstretched.

Well, that may be fine advice for a bunch of goatherds in Bronze Age Palestine.

more like manning a mental health hotline

But in retrospect you're probably better off studying something moderately interesting with someone who's good at it than something very interesting with someone who isn't.

Maybe I got a little carried away with this example.

the smart ones would refuse such a job, leaving only a few with the wrong sort of ambition

or the painter who can't afford to heat his studio and thus has to wear a beret indoors.

you'll face a force more powerful than other people's skepticism: your own skepticism.

And that in turn proves that dismissing new ideas is not so deeply rooted in human nature that it can't be unlearnt.

At the very least they'll be able to say, when you're famous, that they've known you since way back.

If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail.

those who dismiss them are in fact more likely to be right

It is after all an extremely lucrative trick, and those tend to spread quickly.

We just don't have enough experience with early versions of ambitious projects to know how to respond to them

Conversely, you see a surprising number of really well-run startups that have all aspects of operations completely buttoned down, HR policies in place, great sales model, thoroughly thought-through marketing plan, great interview processes, outstanding catered food, 30" monitors for all the programmers, top tier VCs on the board—heading straight off a cliff due to not ever finding product/market fit.

You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of “blah”, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.

the market pulls product out of the startup

Just try having a great team and no product, or a great market and no product. What’s wrong with you?

And lots of people picked shoes purely based on color. “I like green” was enough to turn someone away from a blue shoe that fit them better.

mapping

Vulnerabiliy

To facilitate the process, the king had a railway track constructed: two straight lines of glistening steel leading up to the dragon’s abode.

Nobody kept count

Spiritual men sought to comfort those who were afraid of being eaten by the dragon (which included almost everyone, although many denied it in public) by promising another life after death, a life that would be free from the dragon-scourge.