90+% value comes from 10% of what we read. Here’s my summary of favorites from April.
Books
Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B Rosenburg
- Core takeaway – Focus on people’s unmet needs when communicating
- Four parts to Nonviolent communication process
- Observation – First observe without judging
- Feelings – Describe your own emotions
- Needs – connect to your unmet need based on basic human needs
- Requests – use specific language to ask for what you want
- Key points
- We control our own feelings
- “What others say and do may be the stimulus for, but never the cause of our own feelings” (from emotional slavery chapter)
- Make requests not demand
- If you make a request and other person can’t meet it, but you get frustrated then it isn’t a request but a demand
- Others perceive requests as demand when people believe they’ll be punished if they don’t comply
- Empathize with someone particularly when they’re angry
- “Rather than put your “but” in the phase of an angry person, empathize”
- When you disagree with someone focus on their needs vs what they are saying they think
- Emphasize control over your own actions and joyful reasons for making them
- Change “have to” to “choose to”
- Don’t do things for obligation, but instead desire to contribute to life
- Ex “I choose to work to provide stability for family vs …I have to go to work”
- Judgment of someone else corresponds to an unmet need
- Take the time to reflect on what your need is instead of reflecting on others
- When appreciating others you also need to connect to feelings/needs
- Don’t just say thank you. “Thank you in NVC is this is what you did, this what I feel, this is the need of mine that was met”
- We control our own feelings
- Actions I should take
- When feeling, connect to need.
- I feel… because I …
- Important when angry to pause/connect to feelings and needs
- Use specific and positive language when making a request
- Ask what you want not what you don’t
- Paraphrase messages back to make sure they’re understood
- Repeat back what was said and ask others to repeat back to make sure you understand
- This allows you have best chance of understanding others’ needs
- Critical for emotionally charged messages as the person wants to be heard
- Listen for your own unmet needs
- Especially when frustrated or annoyed
- “When a, I feel b, because I am needing c. Therefore I now would like d”
- Before responding to others ask if they want you to just listen or give advice
- Be conscious of what needs you actions serve “have to” to “choose to”
- When saying thank you, connect to how it made you feel and your unmet need it met
- When feeling, connect to need.
Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World by Graham Allison and Robert Blackwill
- Summary of responses from Lee Kuan Yew in 2013 to how he thinks about strategy. Great depth but succinct
- China summary
- China intends to be world’s greatest power
- China strategy has been to avoid direct conflict with US while growing 20-30 years to point that it can
- China’s problems are
- Limited rule of law
- Chinese language
- English as competitive advantage
- English is central language everyone speaks
- Made English Singapore’s language which opens Singapore to world and anyone can move to Singapore
- This is especially true with the US as anyone can immigrate.
- Connection to LLMs too as you continue getting network effects on English based models
- US strengths
- Big strength of US is capacity for change
- US use of English is a big advantage over Chinese. Chinese can immigrate to US but not other way around
- Sees 4 strengths US
- National belief in independence and self reliance
- Respect for new business
- Acceptance of failure in entrepreneurialism
- Tolerance of high income disparity
- Strong belief in capitalism
- Need incentive for people to keep growing and progress
- Meritocracies push ppl forward. Competition is key
- Believer in equality of opportunity. Incentivize ppl to take chances and then social safety net for those at bottom who totally fail
- Thinks socialization of UK and high taxes removed incentives to push
- Curious how china’s crackdowns will impact this
- Creating a system of full equality is impossible. To move forward need capitalism
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
- Productivity and time management can be a trap as you try to do everything
- Similar to hedonic treadmill
- Instead realize you won’t have time for everything
- Technologies to “get on top of everything” can fail you by just making there be more of a never ending stream
- What you give your attention to is how you spend your life.
- There is no difference between attention and life
- People worry because they’re worried the future won’t turn out x
- Only way to solve this is to accept you have no control over the future
- Plan as you can and then be ok when plans go awry
- Time is valuable because we share it with others
- If people had all the time in the world, but by themselves it’d suck
- Realize time with others you care about is key
- Overall advice for time management (in appendix)
- Limit your work in progress
- only focus on 3 things max at a time
- Have one to do list of your focus and one of everything else
- Decide in advance what to fail at
- Ask yourself, are you ignoring the things that don’t matter?
- Decide what you’ll devote 0 energy to
- Keep a list of everything you’ve completed (not just what’s open)
- Consolidate your caring and focus
- Ignore most things
- You connect more when it’s only a few charities
- Be curious about other people (he says be a researcher in relationships)
- Be instantaneously generous
- When you think of something kind do it
- Practice doing nothing
- Be able to be bored
- Be fully engrossed in whatever you’re doing
- Limit your work in progress
Articles
- 10 Thoughts From the Fourth Trimester by Tim Urban
- Incomparable Tim Urban sums up what it’s like to be a new Dad
- My Favorite of his thoughts
- A newborn isn’t a baby
- There should be training for parents
- Babies are overly dramatic all the time
- The parent newborn relationship is one sided and the baby doesn’t care about you
- You feel intense love, but baby doesn’t care
- Babies schedules are just bananas and they don’t care
- You don’t become a parent overnight and it takes time
- Even if its a big BC-AD line, you don’t realize what it’s like to have a 13 year old
- It’s the biggest moment but takes time to sync in
- Having a baby really makes him think about the future
- 8 Google Employees Invented Modern AI. Here’s the Inside Story from Wired
- Story of the group that invented the transformers model in infamous “attention is all you need” paper
- Idea of self-attention happened from trying to parse multiple things in sentence
- Take a passage like Joe is a baseball player, and after a good breakfast he went to the park and got two hits. To make sense of “two hits,” a language model has to remember the part about baseball
- “They picked the name transformers” from “day zero,” Uszkoreit says. The idea was that this mechanism would transform the information it took in, allowing the system to extract as much understanding as a human might—or at least give the illusion of that.”
- Fascinating thing is all 8 people have left Google and founded multiple startups using transformers and many valued in billions
- 6 of 8 born outside US and other 2 are second generation sons of Germans
- That’s why it evaluated German to US
- Born out of lots of hallway conversations
- You’re Only As Good As Your Worst Day from Farnam Street
- What happens when things aren’t going great determines outcomes better
- “Products and services are only as good as they are when they break, not when everything is functioning fine.”
- “companies are only as good as how they behave in a public relations crisis.”
- Only when the tide goes out can you tell who is swimming naked
- We show people the most about who we are during times of crisis
- What happens when things aren’t going great determines outcomes better
- Terraform Industries converts electricity and air into synthetic natural gas for the first time from TechCrunch
- Terraform is a startup that’s captures Co2 from air and converts it into synthetic natural gas
- Runs off solar energy
- Intended to address societies’ need for hydrocarbons and doing it in clean/repeatable/cost effective way
- Awesome idea where we’re able to use hydrocarbon technology we still have deployed while getting cleaner energy
- Terraform is a startup that’s captures Co2 from air and converts it into synthetic natural gas
- Why Is It So Hard to Build an Airport? – from Brian Potter/Construction Physics
- Fascinating walkthrough on the history of building airports
- Of the 50 largest airports in the US, the average age is 82 years, and only three have been built in the last 50 years.
- These handle 80% of US traffic too
- Two major limitations on building airports
- Sheer size
- Need to both be nearby city to be useful, but also take a ton of space
- “Denver International Airport is as large as the city of San Francisco
- NIMBYism
- Benefits are diffuse and spread out around city
- Costs are concentrated to those nearby who vigorously oppose it (ex: sound)
- Sheer size
- The Data Center is the New Compute Unit: Nvidia’s Vision for System-Level Scaling from Fabricated Knowledge
- Jensen’s line is data center is new compute
- “In this new paradigm, the rack itself is similar to a chip, and now, if we frame the rack as the new chip, we have a whole new vector to scale performance and power.”
- The same concepts at chip level (moving bits closer to increase performance) apply at the rack level as well
- Nvidia is switching paradigm from chips to system of chips
- The integration across all of them is what matters
- Nvidia is focusing on transferring data between chips by copper wiring because it’s the fastest possible and effectively free. This is the approach to system of chips (data center) vs previous approach just focusing on compute
- Biggest aspect enabling this is new “liquid cooling” which allows 2x cooling efficiency
- Author believes in Nvidia’s system of chips approach here and thinks Nvidia has thought this out much more than any other competitor
- Jensen’s line is data center is new compute
- Meta and Open by Ben Thompson at Stratechery
- Meta is leaning into open approach compared to Apple
- Ben makes point that the only metric that matters for social media is time spent on apps (ie attention)
- This is the lens which you need to view all of Meta strategy
- This is why Meta copied Snapchat and TikTok successfully in both cases. It wasn’t predicated on being a social network, but more so focusing on leveraging its user base to make sure time spent is focused on Meta
- View two new developments through this lens
- Meta licensing Horizon OS to other device manufacturers so other manufacturers can build out AR and VR experiences
- This is intended to generate focus on it as single solution and make sure Meta headsets spread out to most consumers in VR
- Llama 3 models now being open sourced
- Think about Llama 3 as equivalent to Google’s Android defensive strategy
- Llama 3 ensures that Meta isn’t dependent on any one model being successful, but can instead focus on generating content which Meta has a competitive advantage in
- Meta licensing Horizon OS to other device manufacturers so other manufacturers can build out AR and VR experiences
- [1hr Talk] Intro to Large Language Models by Andrej Karpathy
- Simply put the best overview of basics of LLMs from one of the space’s foremost practitioners
- Think about neural networks as lossy compression of internet
- Model training compresses all the knowledge we have
- We know how the model training works, but not how exact inferences are generated
- Based on two things you can predict performance of model
- # of parameters in network
- Amount of text trained on (tokens)
- Thinks about LLMs as main “kernel” which you can base knowledge solving off
- Can browse the internet, generate text, leverage python, make charts, etc.
- Think about LLMs as operating systems organizing problem solving