good vibes https://xitter.cf/t.co/CGU9w7Y9nb
Joined February 2018
- Tweets1.6K
- Following858
- Followers100
- Likes5.2K
Ittetsu retweeted
"how to avoid brain rot" was a great watch. some of my favorites points:
- using ai to ask yourself socratic questions instead of giving you the answer makes you feel like you're learning less but research shows you're actually learning more
- ai tooling is moving so fast that it's better to know 50% of a new tool than to master 90% of an older tool
Ittetsu retweeted
this isn't a controversial opinion, but it can be easy to lose sight of: 2027 is going to be a batshit insane year
some interesting reading for your long weekend secureacceleration.com/secur…
Ittetsu retweeted
I made a microprocessor and want to tell you all about it!
Video covers at a high level HDL and programming, synthesis/layout and bringup
It was a lot of work, but really fun! 10/10, would recommend everyone tape out some custom silicon 😊
youtube.com/watch?v=q6ytRHaT…
Ittetsu retweeted
John Schulman (co-founder of Thinking Machines and OpenAI) wrote that goal-driven research beats idea-driven research.
I realized it's also really good life advice.
Don't chase what other people are doing. Figure out what life you want, and then figure out how to get there.
99% of men are living in servitude. I thought about this some days back, when I was coming back from jogging. I believe this is true as most of people want to live a life risk free.
So, I have developed this anti-follower thesis. Instead of just following someone, read and reflect on their work and try to connect the dots where those ideas came from originally and don’t attach yourself emotionally with the person whom you like listening to
Ittetsu retweeted
btw if you are looking for a thrilling paper to read this weekend check the black box distillation one from alibaba it’s really good
Ittetsu retweeted
A decent fraction of the parts of academia I'm from would basically make their career by upgrading simulations from ten years before using the latest supercomputers.
Claude and I have been having fun doing this at scale for the last few months.
Incredibly alpha in scraping old papers for "computationally prohibitive" and throwing GPUs at it.
I'm old enough to remember reading Born and Wolf and the principle of holography stating that with enough computing power you can solve the complete Green function within some volume down to half a wavelength (or even better...) but that that level of computation was beyond imagination. So we made do with beam ultrasound, like peasants.
finding one's passion is a task which involves a lot of grid search. You have continuously experiment and be patient to find the right thing.
The issue with telling people to pursue their interests / passions is that most people don’t actually know what those are. And don’t realize it takes work and time to figure that out. So they’ll end up motionless and directionless if you don’t give them something to work towards. Most intrinsically motivated people were blessed with some hyper fixation as a child that inspired them through adulthood, and most adults don’t have the time or energy to do that on top of their day job
Ittetsu retweeted
Beating yourself up about procrastinating makes it worse. Now the task carries the original dread plus the shame of avoiding it. You've made the emotion heavier, so of course you avoid harder.
Self-forgiveness reduces future procrastination. Being kind to yourself is strategically correct.
Ittetsu retweeted
Research ideas you can't be outscaled on.
Many important problems in ML now demand compute no university lab can match, and junior students feel the constant pressure of getting scooped. I wanted to share a different bet: research directions where insight may still matter more than scale.
These are deliberately unconventional — grounded in mechanisms rarely seen in the usual scaling playbook. Because they sit in the long tail, they're unlikely to show up in AI-generated research idea lists. No guaranteed success, but real open questions with enough material to get started.
If you find these useful, PRs to add more are welcome. I'll keep updating too.
antheali.github.io/open-rese…
Every beautiful piece of equation ever produced went through a boiling broth of struggle and rejections.
Standard schooling in mathematics requires years of prerequisites before students encounter interesting mathematics.
There's a four-volume set called "The World of Mathematics," edited by James Newman, that collects some of the most beautiful mathematical writing ever produced, all accessible to a thoughtful reader without advanced training.
Pair that with Edwin Abbott's "Flatland," a novella from 1884 that explores dimensions through the story of a square living in a two-dimensional world, and you have an entry into mathematical thinking that is far more engaging to the mathematical imagination than standard textbooks.
And then there's Einstein's 1905 special relativity paper. People assume it requires graduate-level physics. It doesn't. It's mostly algebra. You follow the argument step by step, and out pops E=mc² at the end. We've used it with high school seniors.
Textbooks present results. Original texts present the struggle. When you read Einstein's actual paper, you see a mind working through a problem. You see the choices, the assumptions, the reasoning. You're not memorizing a formula. You're watching genius in real time and following along.
This is what we mean by giving students texts worthy of their attention. Mathematics has a literature, a rich, beautiful, humanly meaningful one. When we reduce math to procedures and answer keys, we strip away exactly what makes it inspiring to the independent thinker.
