Superladiva > Recent Status Updates

It’s interesting to see how the current ubiquity of large language models and AI vibe coding mostly negates Newport’s opening example in his decade-old book of deep work helping someone gain riches by self-teaching himself to become a highly-paid computer programmer.

There’s a big focus on CBT and self-examination: “Knowing that your brain is looking for negative thoughts, creating them on purpose, wanting to believe them as truths, and offering them to you repetitively as a matter of biological efficiency is the key to hearing and recognizing your thoughts for what they are: just thoughts.”

“When I reached back out to Lilliana Mason, the Johns Hopkins political scientist, her latest data showed a record 60 percent of Americans now approved of political violence if the other party initiates it, up from 40 percent four years before.”

“School leaders are resigned to the fact that too many teens “are waiting around either to become famous or to fall off the face of the earth,” writes the child development professor Robert Halpern. “A great quantity of youthful idealism, energy, imagination, questioning, pushing at boundaries has no place to go.””

In 2024, two Republican lawmakers in the statehouse introduced a bill that would … require religious-based instruction in all schools. Oklahoma had already passed such a law; Texas would soon follow. “Perhaps, in a show of fairness, these state officials could mandate the teaching of algebra in churches,” one critic quipped.

“In the span of a decade, Reagan had systematically shifted our federal financial aid apparatus from being need based to greed based, and now Clinton was upping the game to prove his “new Democrat” bona fides. And no one, save a few writers, educators, and nonprofit organizations, said a word.”

“‘It occurred to me after seeing my old friends in Urbana who’ve done very well: If you had a big family business or a farm, you either stayed, or you went away for college and came back.’ If you didn’t have inherited land or wealth in the form of an established family business and you went away to college, you didn’t return.”

“We don’t carry new books, and it’s best this way…A sanctuary, if you will. Where all the circus elephants go to retire and live out their slow days in peace, no longer having to perform for anyone.”

“When humans demand that their AIs become capable of doing something new, the entity they get is not something an engineer carefully designed to work in a comfortable and familiar way. It is a mostly-working answer stumbled upon by gradient descent tweaking hundreds of billions of numbers until the entity performs well enough at the task.”

Unlike any book I’ve read before. Although it’s about suicide, it not overly fraught and depressing. It’s actually a bit detached, but sentimental at the same time. I like the tempo - it’s like the writing is in 5/4 time, flitting across time with little vignettes and keeping you on your toes.