brian_spiering

I taught a flipped classroom online. Students had to successful pass a quiz on the before class materials to get the join link to the session.

I worked at a small VC-backed startup that tried to create a marketplace for algorithms in a small niche. We were the platform that enterprise customers trusted, and we standardized access to proprietary algorithms. We subsidized the marketplace by implementing algorithms ourselves and offering steep discounts to early enterprise customers.

I saw right away that it would take years to build up a two-sided marketplace, and we did not have enough money for that runway. I created a skunk works that did product-based consulting. That generated meaningful cash flow but was not respected as strategic by the board.

The company became a zombie for a long time. In the end, it was forced to be acquired to make the initial VC money whole.

My advice is to build fast to get to a critical level. Then be prepared to drip-feed it for a long time to see if it becomes self-sustaining.

In the USA, there was a person who was traveling around removing bolts. The person showed up in our local area. A couple of members of the climbing community had a conversation with the local police. The police had a concern about him creating a potentially dangerous situation of people trying a climb and expecting to find bolts only to find the bolts missing. The police went out of their way to arrest him. They got him on probation violation and had him extradited to his home state. The climbing community replaced all the removed bolts, and people went back to enjoying the rock climbing.

The local climbing community chose to take care of this quietly without media or internet drama.

I signed up for it (took about 5 minutes). I'm cautiously optimistic about it having positive return on that investment.

One of the best things I have done is sign up for DMAchoice and optoutprescreen.com which has completely stopped junk mail for me.

I got a the highest paid job I could find with the skills I have that I enjoyed "well-enough". I spent less than I earned. I made mostly low risk investments (with a handful of high risk investments). I consistently did those behaviors for many decades. I also got lucky that nothing bad happened to me.

The Art of War by Steven Pressfield. It addresses the fears associated with any new endeavor and how to create systems to dance with the fears.

The Sierra Nevada region has a similar history of using the "checkerboard" pattern to promote railroad building. Organizations like the Trust for Public Land and the Truckee Donner Land Trust that are systematically acquiring many of these checkerboard inholdings to preserved them from future development and open them to low-impact public recreation.

That is interesting because of the Halo effect. There is a cognitive bias that if a person is right in one area, they will be right in another unrelated area.

I try to temper my tendency to believe the Halo effect with Warren Buffett's notion of the Circle of Competence; there is often a very narrow domain where any person can be significantly knowledgeable.

Yes, there is hope to fully own a self driving vehicle as a consumer. One example is comma.ai, inc.

You are correct that those concepts are interrelated. It works well not to get caught up in precise definitions. Instead, reflect on your current level and take the next best step.

The Lindy effect can be a useful heuristic. Something invented 30 months probably has less long-term value something that was invented 10 years ago and is being used.

Given the current rate of development, it probably won't be an issue for a while.

In Japan, houses are presumed to have a limited lifespan and depreciate in value over time.

Try David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD), part of which is the Natural Planning Model.

One heuristic is to choose foods without nutrition labels.

The Real Book is an excellent resource for what it is. However since it is the primary book of jazz, it can have too much of an influence. The Real Book has a limited number of songs and entire subgenres of jazz are not represented. The structure of the songs is relatively narrow. Songs are rarely added.

There is the nearby Yuba Gap.

I use the "launch ramp" technique. Ask a series of prompts (instead of a single prompt with a long answer). Explain the prompts that will get progressively more complex, aka the ramp will gradually get steeper and get very steep later. I can stop the interview quickly if the candidate can not find simple mistakes and how to remedy them. I can also jump ahead to complex issues to engage highly qualified candidates.

I was working with a non-profit that taught people around the world how to teach tech skills in their local communities. There was a shift to focusing on recent political events which was a major reason for my leaving. My take was if you personally want to do that, go for it. However, reacting to recent political events was not part of the group's mission. I wanted to spend my limited time on the group's primary mission of education.

The continued evolution of war.

“Hurdling trenches, crawling over shell craters, and walking through forests unhalted by intense gunfire, the tanks cannot be stopped by anything less than a direct hit from shells of considerable caliber,” reports The Ogden Standard of October 21, 1916, 4 p.m. City Edition https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-wwi-tanks

My mathematics anki cards are here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1715995729?cb=1697579387129

They are organized by category with a focus on fundamentals.

I teach tech of all kind, mostly Python programming and advanced data skills. I get deep satisfaction in helping learners on their journey. I also enjoy connecting with them as people. Teaching has made a fulfilling career for the last 20 years. Hopefully, I keep doing it for a couple of more decades.

Sam Harris is contributing to modern philosophy. He wrote a book entitled "Lying" about on why we should not lie. His talk "Science can answer moral questions" is worth waching https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_answer_mora...

I have at least three different kinds of journals:

1. Workout journal - I write down want I did and what was the effect. Often trends physical trends emerge after weeks, months, or years.

2. Summary of the day journal - Whenever I can, I write a short summary of the day/week. I look back to help my memory.

3. Problem journal - If I have a specific, important problem, I dump everything into a single spot. It reduces rumination, slows down my thought process, provides perspective by seeing it externally, and often solutions organically emerge.

There are skateboard coaches. I hired one after skating for 10+ years, and it made a qualitative leap in my abilities.

Accreditation (and funding) in the United States often times requires grades.

I taught in a system that tried to implement "equitable grading" with unlimited attempts until the end of the term. In practice, this idea was untenable for instructors.

Many students would turn in low-quality work to get feedback, then make very minor incremental changes. This process would be repeated many times. The result was a higher than typical grading load for the instructor (sometimes it felt like I was spending more time on the assignment than the student).

Students would wait until the end to complete the work. The result was students spread out through the content. As an instructor, you could not expect students to know the fundamentals necessary for more advanced material later in the term. The procrastinating students then would expect a lot of rapid feedback at the end of the term. Again, increasing the grading load.

Reinforcement Learning (most likely)

Parts of NLP have made great progress. There are still parts of NLP that could still be improved, such as the truthiness of generated answers.

One possibility is interactive, multi-step actions on the internet (e.g., book hotels and apply for jobs).