🐦 Karpathy on Sutton (Andrej Karpathy). This helped me understand the debate that Sutton and Dwarkesh were having when it seemed like they just used words very differently.

# link, tweet, ml

📖 Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling (2015; via Seth Rogan). Where in the world did I see a recommendation from Seth Rogan and what possessed me to add this book to my queue? No clue. Sometimes I just end up reading random things. This was pretty random.

# link, book, memoir

📖 The Predictioneer's Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future by Bruce Bueno De Mesquita (2009). Reading this book in 2025 is like finding an ancient prophecy that everyone has forgotten. Not perfect, but so many good calls. It also contains this gem:

My idea is that the Israeli and Palestinian governments will distribute a portion of their tax revenue generated from tourism (and only from tourism) to each other. Before going into the details—where the devil resides—let’s first see why tourist revenue and not any other. Why not, for example, promote peace by setting up joint Israeli-Palestinian ventures, or allowing freer movement between regions, or some other scheme? As we will see, shared tourist revenue provides a nearly unique opportunity.

[...]

The tourist tax revenue arrangement need not last forever. It must include an irrevocable commitment for it to persist for a long time (say twenty years), and it is important that this tax revenue sharing be tied to a fixed formula based on the current populations and not on future changes in those populations. Opening the formula to renegotiation could create perverse incentives. It is also essential that the definition of tax revenue originating from spending by tourists be based on predetermined rules for estimating this source of income. Independent accounting firms might be used to provide a standard way to define and identify tourist revenue and the taxes derived from it. This tax revenue would then be allocated to each side over the agreed duration of the program based on a onetime fixed population-based formula with no questions asked.

Using Game Theory to play through the whole scenario was a fascinating take.

# link, book, forecasting

📖 The Courage to Be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness by Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga (2018; via Patrick Gleason). I never heard of Alfred Adler or his school of psychology (he was a contemporary of Freud's). There are lots of commonplace examples which makes this an interesting read, but I suspect some of the claims are a bit too strong (e.g., "trauma" not being a real thing).

# link, book, thinking, Patrick Gleason

📝 Why Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn Dexterity (Rodney Brooks). While it's hard for me to judge on the main argument, I can totally see the words changing:

Following that pattern, what it means to be a humanoid robot will change over time.

Before too long (and we already start to see this) humanoid robots will get wheels for feet, at first two, and later maybe more, with nothing that any longer really resembles human legs in gross form. But they will still be called humanoid robots.

# link, robots, Rodney Brooks

📝 Getting More Strategic (Cate Huston / Accidentally in Code).

We often talk about strategy like it’s defining the end state, setting and describing the destination. But strategy is about defining the incremental steps – the proximate objectives – that can take us towards that end state. Strategy is understanding where we are at – context – and the path from there to where we need to go. Any strategic “plan”, is best executed as a set of proximate objectives.

# link, strategy

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