Friday Fodder #4
What's trending and what's transcendent?
Timely
What Actually Matters In Parenting - I know you need to have the right video monitor with motion detection for your baby, and the right thermostat to ensure proper temperature and humidity, and the right pediatric scented hand lotion, and the right— oh never mind. You know where I’m going with this because we’ve all been there. The things that matter to and for our children are way simpler than we sometimes remember.
Opportunity and Lower Costs - The Grumpy Economist grumpily makes a list of wonderful and mostly boring policies that help a lot but are politically infeasible. As a recovering fan of Peter Zeihan I love to snarf at the Jones Act too.
What School Didn’t Teach Us: You Need To Lose Control - Have you seen that graph that shows risky teen behaviors plummeting while screen and gaming use goes up? (There are different versions.) Maybe we need some of that risk back.
Anthropic’s Prompt Engineering Tutorial - The kindly API lords at Anthropic have made a slick interactive course for learning how to build prompts for Claude. This is aimed more at developers - there’s a Github repo too - but there’s still a lot to learn about the nature of prompting in here. And they released Claude’s system prompts as well. And their prompt library is great too. Oy, enough links!
OpenAI is shockingly good at unminifying code - On a deeper technical level, this one is fascinating. LLMs have been used to encode/decode Base64 for awhile now, but this is the first time I’ve seen an LLM unminify code. Most developers think of minifying code as a 1-way process during builds (of course it isn’t), but the clarity of the resulting code here is pretty neat to see.
Timeless
Learning Is Supposed To Be Difficult - Andrej Karpathy reminds us that learning is a difficult task and gives us a simple algorithm for becoming an expert. I’ve been working out hard in the gym lately and seeing results, but it’s taking effort expended over hours. The line “You want the mental equivalent of sweating” resonated strongly.
The Outlook For Long Term Economic Growth - I’ve been reading Chad Jones papers recently and this is a great intro paper. He explains the importance of ideas being nonrivalrous, the link between growth and population, and some of the headwinds and tailwinds for future economic growth.
The New Internet - Tailscale has opinions on what the Internet should look like in the future. They’re interesting opinions informed by the open protocols that serve as the building blocks and the scale problems that make things the way they are today. We carry a lot of computing power in our pockets these days, so it’s difficult to think of our phones as “dumb terminals”, but it helps represent the centralization problems we have.
Kurosawa’s Letter To Ingmar Bergman - I’m about to have another birthday and I can no longer say things like “I’m in my early 40s”. Time is ticking. Which is why it’s so refreshing to see someone as artful and focused as Kurosawa remind us that it’s OK to take a lifetime.
Books
What Do You Care What Other People Think by Richard Feynman - Feynman is so fun to read because it’s obvious that he is having fun telling his stories. Here he talks about falling in love and his work investigating the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster. Easy to read and delightful.
Some Thoughts On The Common Toad by George Orwell - Orwell didn’t just write dystopian future dramas. He also remarked on gardening and spring. If you want to know what Gulliver’s Travels really means, give it a go.
Generations by Jean Twenge - Twenge is an academic, and as an academic this book is filled with charts and graphs and references. But somehow it’s actually easy to read. She moves through all of the living generations - from the Silent Generation through to Gen Alpha (she calls them the Polars) - and describes their characteristics and impact. I learned a lot about myself, my parents, and my grandparents. And hopefully my kids too.
Cheers!
