A friend was telling me about how he is “bored” with life. He goes to work, maintains his open source project as a hobby, helps out with some local tech comunities, and passively scrolls on social media. He dreams of spending time at cafes, watching movies, relaxing, doing whatever he had in mind, having no…
Author: tre
I just saw someone on my Facebook timeline proudly shared about how he “made a ruckus” on some online scientific forum because he challenged the argument made by a paper titled “Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought” (the article on NYTimes | the paper H/T gwern) (translated) Last Sunday night, I…
In the previous post in this series, I explored the question is there no reason to believe in god? As I followed the thought, the second thing I realised more and more: the religious impulse runs deep and spirituality is innate. Ultimately humans have a deeply-seated urge to feel connected to something larger than ourselves.…
Hi friends, how are you? I was just thinking of a couple of funny stories of when my mother cutely used the wrong words that resulted in unexpected funnies, a phenomenon known as “malapropism”. But actually I want to use the stories as a jump off point to pick up where we last left off…
I saw this video recently https://www.instagram.com/reel/C48KLH0u-Zl/ When the lady said “_I did not see reason to believe that there was a god__”, I realised I have actually changed my stance on this issue. I used to say I believe in god but I don’t believe in religion. But now I think believe in god and…
There’s this clip going around of Jensen Huang being interviewed by Patrick Collison in a Stripe corporate event talking about how he doesn’t do 1:1s. The reason, as discussed within the scope of that segment in the interview, was essentially because he thinks 1) feedbacks (as far as I understood it, on their ideas and…
While writing that previous post, I needed a title for it. Asked chat GPT: I want to create a title for a blog post the post will talk about the value of engaging with a material, how cognitive effort is the key to effective learning I want to contrast it against the idea of merely…
Yesterday this video showed up on my YouTube recommendation feed. Benjamin Keep, PhD, JD – What makes something memorable? https://youtu.be/UW4EMIucmHs Judging by the title, initially I thought it’s about writing techniques, but apparently it’s specifically about learning. Fortunately, learning is still one topic I’m into and I had some time during a commute, so I…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI2g8V2uw3w&ab_channel=ElyseMyers Saw this video earlier. Immediately thought, “this is such a good example to use when I want to talk about externalisation”. Yes, externalisation is such a boring technical term. Conveniently, computer people calls it: “rubber ducking”. // leaving a meta-trace here to talk about an underrated magic that human has access to: creating a…
I was bumping a couple of ideas and concepts against each other this morning. I’m still formulating my thoughts on what problems these parallels and lenses could be useful for, but let’s just look at them right now. Concretely, we’ll talk about Microsoft, Walmart, and Barnes and Nobles. Abstractly, we’ll talk about ‘pattern languages’, differentiations,…