Some things sundry #5
Entropy will fuck you
An eclectic collection of thoughts and links that I found interesting this past week, which I have nowhere to dump than here.
It’s mango season
Feel like it’s my duty to remind my non-Indian friends to run to your local Indian grocery store and grab a box of Alphonso mangoes.
🔗 Entropy will fuck you
When you’re feeling contemplative this weekend, and pondering about your life and all the why’s, this will be a comforting read. One of those rare, rare pieces that carry a spiritual message but isn’t woo-woo.
🔗 95% of what we’re doing in AI is simple enough to explain to a child
A twitter thread that simply explains the concept of “attention” and “transformers” that are the building blocks of LLMs. It also helps you build intuition of what LLMs are not capable of. Was it Richard Feynman who said that if you can’t explain something to a 6-year old, that means you don’t really understand it?
🔗 How to use LLMs in your product
With all the noise around LLMs it’s easy to dive in assuming they can do anything. This is a good set of guardrails on what they can do and can’t do and how to think about designing products around LLMs within those guardrails. Every PM should read this, imo, because every product will incorporate LLMs in some way.
See also my earlier post on building non-deterministic products.
🔗 Hello World
What actually happens when you write a program to display “hello world”. Fun to geek out with this post and incredible to zoom out and realize how many layers of abstractions we’ve built in between these words you are reading and electrons dancing.
🔗 Founder vs Investor
An unusually and uncomfortably candid conversation of all the conflicts of interest between founders and investors. It was only after I listened to it I realized why this didn’t get much airtime on podcast twitter. Worth listening to, if you’re a founder or an investor, and I’m sure you’ll find at least one thing in there that’ll sound heretical in your opinion.
🔗 Tyler's tips on time management
“2. Do the most important things first in the day and don’t let anybody stop you. Estimate ‘most important’ using a zero discount rate. Don’t make exceptions. The hours from 7 to 12 are your time to build for the future before the world descends on you.”
Life is short. Time is the only truly limited resource at hand.