When I was in class 8 or 9, our English teacher told us a story I’ll never forget. There was a poor farmer who lived in a village. He owed the zamindar (landlord) of the village a lot of money. The zamindar had an eye on his daughter. “Marry your daughter to me, and I’ll forgive your debt,” he said. The farmer was reluctant. “Please, sir, what will the village say about your marrying such a young girl?” he asked. ...
High Scepticism + High Humility = Scientist. Editor. Indecisive. “Let’s test it.” Good for high-stakes, irreversible decisions. System 2 thinking is slow and effortful. But if you do this too often or too long, you miss the window or other opportunities. High Scepticism + Low Humility = Critic. Troll. Red Hat. “You are wrong.” Good for stress-testing and auditing. To prevent/anticipate failures. But it’s toxic and demoralizing if you do it too much. ...
This week, I learned: You can use slots to stream HTML out of order! Shane Parrish. Short-term patience podcast have a frame of reference to relate EVERY experience to. That helps you evaluate (measure) and learn. That’s part of what Charlie Munger’s lattice of frameworks is about when there is a very high or very low interest scenario, low interest scenario then go ultra long term. Issued hundred years when the interest rate regime was very low short term optimal is rally long term optimal. So you need to learn to take a loss and look like an idiot to play the long-term game grit is a behavior that enables long-term thinking. Short term success gives you the luxury to think about long term #IMP power is about optionality. It’s about being in a position where you have the options that can affect the positive change rather than circumstances controlling you. Read Robert greene’s book on the 48 laws of Power low leverage enables that begin with the end in mind. Always how do you think about risk? Well, things do happen. It’s as simple as that autonomy and decentralization helps derisk do more and more of what works. That’s a powerful way of compounding long-term investments are better than frequent trading because you get to reinvest the tax you otherwise would have paid. So unless the alternative is super compelling, stay invested if you need to be the person who DOES the thing, you delegate less, leverage list, compound less, because you have to DO. BE A PERSON WHO SETS THE FIELD INSTEAD. The coach, the chess master, the director, patient strategist who Waits for the good hit Being in Control motivates #Lesson. my cycle tires were flat. I thought it was someone pulling out the air and felt very demotivated. But once I carried my cycle pump, I felt so much more in control and power and felt a whole lot better SourceGraph is the default platform for private code completion & search MetaVoice 1B offers voice cloning on American & British accents with 30s training Qwen 1.5 72B appears to outperform Mistral Medium, making it one of the top non-proprietary models Llava 1.6 is a substantial improvement over Llava 1.5 and slightly better than CogVLM, Qwen-VL AI scams are growing. Deepfakes scammed $34m. But voice fake for kidnapping is scarier. Buildspace’s demo is a great demo of how voice and actions can be used effectively. demucs does an EXCELLENT job of splitting songs into drums, bass, vocals and others
This week, I learned: DPO is a simpler alternative to RLHF for fine-tuning. Several HuggingFace models use DPO for training Name2Vec is a potential embedding for names. Google Knowledge Graph ID powers the Knowledge Graph. If it begins with /m/ it’s the same as the FreeBase ID. This is now available as WikiData. e.g https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P2671 I tried running Mixtral-8x7b locally (via Llamafile) and on together.ai. It’s good, but far from GPT 4. Generic computate-intensive algorithms eventually beat domain-specific tuning, because of Moore’s law. Ref The hidden brain podcast. the mystery of beauty Evolution drove us to beauty as an efficient survival mechanism. Understanding the world is one such mechanism. Hence we enjoy maths and chess ⭐ This leaderboard included paid models like GPT4 and Claude and compared them with open models on HUMAN + system benchmarks Lez Friedman Podcast: Jeff Bezos Build stuff that is is ubiquitous that other people take it for granted. The initial idea needs to be that obvious and easy. Like one click purchase or customer reviews Build stuff that other people can build on. Internet makes startups possible. Infrastructure is about enabling others at scale Decision making approaches: single person decides on two way doors. Deliberate as a team on one way doors Conflict resolution: disagree and COMMIT. NO sniping, I told you so, malicious compliance. Avoid compromise. Avoid decision by attrition (most persistent wins). People are inherently biased towards hierarchy. So the senior most person should speak last We have a happiness bias. Contracted by choosing the unhappier options first The map is not the territory. The metric is not the objective. We need metrics. But make sure you know why See the world through the eyes of the customer. Use your own product. It’s living their lives that makes customer obsession real. Jeff Bezos called their own customer care to see how long the actual wait time was. It was much longer than the metric reported How to prioritize. whatever problems customers will still face in 10 years are the big problems. These are worth putting time into because they are stable in time People working on big problems will never get down to the small problems. So have a dedicated team that works only on the paper cuts. It should be a dedicated team We co evolve with our tools. We build tools and then our tools change us. It reprograms our brains Cut out 10 minutes to the beginning of each meeting for people to read the material. They never reread anyway. This makes the meetings more productive Powerpoint is designed for persuasion, not truth seeking. It is also easier for the author than for the reader. Prefer narratives that are focused on finding the truth and are easier for the audience though tougher for the author ⭐ whisper-standalone-win provides a Windows binary for Faster-Whisper. It just needs CUDA and cuDNN installed. Then whisper-faster.exe video.mkv --language=English --model=medium generates the transcript. LLM use cases by Benedict Evans “Every text box on the internet will get an LLM” “Infinite interns” “Every UNIX function has become a company.” “Every ChatGPT suggestion…” llm360 publishes models along with training datasets. In The Age of AI has begun, Mar 2023, Bill Gates says, “In my lifetime, I’ve seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary.” The GUI (1980) and ChatGPT (2022). Rubeus is a HTTP proxy for multiple LLMs with load-balancing, fallbacks and retries. GPTRouter is a Python interface for multiple LLMs with fallbacks and retries. ⭐ Token Tally has an LLM Cost Tool that estimates GPU memory required and token cost across cloud providers.
A quote from David Heinemeier Hansson: So the problem is, a lot of business managers and especially business owners, they have no sense of probability. They can’t fathom that concept. So They treat the probability of 1 to 10 trillion as the same as a 1 to a 100. And like, “We’ve got to deal with this 1 to a trillion probability, because, what if it happens?” No! Doesn’t matter! I mean, don’t care. ...
I found this piece from “The Happiness Hypothesis” pretty interesting: In the 1990s, Damasio found that when certain parts of the orbitofrontal cortex are damaged, patients lose most of their emotional lives. They report that when they ought to feel emotion, they feel nothing, and studies of their autonomic reactions (such as those used in lie detector tests) confirm that they lack the normal flashes of bodily reaction that the rest of us experience when observing scenes of horror or beauty. Yet their reasoning and logical abilities are intact. They perform normally on tests of intelligence and knowledge of social rules and moral principles. ...
If you’re ever taken a course in Economics, and it discussed Game Theory, you may be familiar with The Prisoner’s Dilemma. Roughly, this is the problem. Assume you possess copious quantities of some item (money, for example), and wish to obtain some amount of another item (perhaps stamps, groceries, diamonds). You arrange a mutually agreeable trade with the only dealer of that item known to you. You are both satisfied with the amounts you will be giving and getting. For some reason, though, your trade must take place in secret. Each of you agrees to leave a bag at a designated place in the forest, and to pick up the other’s bag at the other’s designated place. Suppose it is clear to both of you that the two of you will never meet or have further dealings with each other again. ...
Paul Graham pens another brilliant essay on Is it worth being wise? It’s mostly about the difference between being wise (right most of the time) versus being smart (being right where few others are). If you’re picking between options, being wise is useful. There is a best option, and you’ll pick it most of the time. If you’re doing something creative, there’s no finite set of options. Then it’s worth being smart. Increasingly, tasks are asking for more creativity, so it may be better to be smart.
Malcolm Gladwell argues that knowing less can be an advantage. This is based on a study in which kids in the US were asked which was a bigger city: San Antonio or San Diego. Many didn’t know. Kids in Germany were asked the same. Most knew: San Diego was bigger. Why? Because they’d heard of San Diego, but not of San Antonio. P.S: A comment mentions that the actual difference in population between these cities is only 2%. So maybe the US kids were right to be unsure… ...
I am selecting a CRM package for a bank. I asked my colleagues how they’d gone about it, and got 8 responses. Every single one of them had the same weighting approach: Take a huge list of criteria, assign weights, score each package, calculate a weighted-average score, pick the highest one. As I mentioned earlier, I think weighting is a lousy method. (See Errors in multicriteria decision making.) You can’t say “I picked this package because it has X, Y and Z features, which the others don’t.” You can only say, “Oh, overall, it has the highest score…” ...
I talked about my approach for multicriteria decision-making, and mentioned that it was fundamentally flawed. Here’s why. The charts above compared two industries. The bigger the area, the more favourable the industry. The underlying assumptions being: The criteria are comparable. (Points at the same level are of comparable importance. Twice as large is twice as important.) All (and only) relevant criteria have been included. In this particular example, I know for a fact that both these assumptions are invalid. And in every case I used this methodology, the assumptions fail. ...
Mathematics, marriage and finding somewhere to eat has a simple solution to all these problems. Whether you’re hiring someone, or picking a partner, or finding a house – or any problem that requires you to pick the best among N choices – here’s the rule. Scan the first 37% of choices. Then pick the first one that’s better than anything you’ve seen so far.
I’m a cautious gadget freak. I love buying gadgets, but think a lot before buying them. Invariably, I use spreadsheets to help me decide. I try to buy only those gadgets that are right for me at the cheapest possible price, and I look at two things: features based on usage and breakeven. Usage-driven buying I pick the features I want based on my usage. For example, when I bought my first mobile, I listed the my most likely uses for the phone: ...
Once, we were looking at whether banks made money on demand drafts (DDs). DDs are costly. 90% of a bank’s costs are people-related, and it takes a fair bit of time (hence people) to process DDs. If you pay for DDs in cash, it costs even more because the teller has to count the notes. To recover this cost, banks charge a fee. The fee increases with the size of the DD. A DD for Rs 10,000 may cost Rs 50, while one for Rs 100,000 may cost Rs 200. ...
Quote by Herbert Simon on Information: What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. It sounds quite like the Scientific American article The Tyranny of Choice which says that after a point, more choice causes unhappiness. The satisfaction of picking the best choice is less, because the second best is almost as good. And you’re more likely to not pick the best – because there are so many choices – and will regret it more often. ...
Thinking, a book by Hardman and Macchi, says people would much rather let bad things happen, than take a risk to stop them: Decisions with identical outcomes are judged as worse when they result from acts of commission than acts of omission. For example, most people are reluctant to vaccinate children against a potentially lethal flu when side effects of the vaccine can cause death. Faced with a flu epidemic that is expected to kill 10 out of 10,000 children, most people are not willing to accept a 9 out of 10,000 risk of death from vaccination, and the median acceptable maximum risk is 5 in 10,000. Apparantly, killing a child with a vaccination (that is, an act of commission) is perceived as worse than causing its death by failing to vaccinate (that is, an act of omission). ...
A neurological experiment indicates that we can make better decisions sub-consciously, even if we can’t explain why.