Kicked off the 2nd batch of Turing’s Dream, the AI residency that I run in Bangalore!

Here’s what they’re upto… 1/ Adithya S Kolavi @adithya_s_k is a 4th year engineering student at PES.

In 2024, he set a target to achieve 10k stars across his github repositories

His most famous one is Omniparse and has 5.5k stars, it's a library that converts unstructured data into structured data for LLMs github.com/adithya-s-k/om…

How to achieve success without trying to shoot for it!

My notes from the #book "Why Greatness Cannot be Planned" by @kenneth0stanley and @joelbot3000

🧵 1/ It’s an unconventional self-help book disguised as a computer science research exposition (that’s why the publisher is Springer).

I strongly recommend reading it.

Here is a taste of the book’s main ideas. 👇

Turing’s Dream first batch - who is in it and what they’re upto.

🧵 1/ Praveen Chavali - @praveen_chavali is exploring the math of neural networks, and is trying to build a black box optimization method for compressing large models into smaller models.

At yesterday’s tech deep dive, he showed why GANs never converge.

How to be a messy thinker

🧵 1/ I love thinking about thinking. Give me a research paper on rationality, cognitive biases or mental models, and I’ll gobble it up.

Given the amount of knowledge I’ve ingested on these topics, I had always assumed that I’m a clear thinker.

Why time seems to pass faster as we age.

🧵 1/ I’ve been mega-obsessed with this feeling.

A year as a 36 year old seems so much shorter as compared to when I was a kid or even as a teen.

It seems cosmically unfair - have less years to live, and each year is flying by faster.

A (massive) thread on dopamine

🧵 1/ If you prefer the blog format, this thread is available on my website too:

invertedpassion.com/a-primer-on-do…

List of books I read in 2023.

🧵 1/ My favorite one was perhaps this one. It traces parallels between religion and trans-humanism.

Highly, highly recommend it.

https://x.com/paraschopra/status/1685186591789326336?s=20

Effective technique for not getting involved with thoughts and emotions. Correction: it’s acceptance commitment therapy.

By the way, not fusing with thoughts and emotions is the core of mindfulness and is pretty powerful.

The best guidelines for any forum/network I've seen is that from Hacker News.

And the wonderful thing is that these guidelines actually work - Hacker News is the most inspiring and thoughtful forum out there.

Other networks like Twitter can learn a thing or two from it. Sidenote: the massive work of moderating this long list of guidelines is done by ONE person.

Though increasingly we can have LLMs (like ChatGPT) interpret such guidelines and try to provide feedback to people before they make low-effort, clickbaity, rage-inducing comments.

The danger of pleasing the algorithm to go viral is that gradually you end up selling yourself to big tech companies. This is how it works.

• Algorithms optimize for time spent on platform, because more time spent = more time for showing ads

• Algorithms promote content that sucks in more people (i.e. content that can go viral)

• Certain types of content is inherently more viral (rage… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Games are problems people pay to solve.

🧵 1/ Good definitions are powerful.

Lately, while reading The Art of Game Design, it became clear to me that the author’s definition of games makes a lot of sense.

He defines games as problems that people pay to solve with either their time or money.

Curiosity literally pays because it pushes you to figure out how things work under the hood.

A curious person doesn’t take anything at face value - there is always a deeper level to dig.

All this digging builds a refined model of the world, which then enables better decisions. A non-curios person treats most decisions as black boxes and hence defers experts without realising experts come with their own agenda and biases.

This is called Plutchik's wheel of emotions.

Its secrets 👇 1/ The 8 bipolar emotions lie as opposite pairs

• sadness and joy
• anticipation and surprise
• trust and disgust

Each emotion has three intensity levels:

• serenity -> joy -> ecstacy
• boredom -> disgust -> loathing

A less known cheat-code for sleep is keeping a notebook by the bedside.

Whenever you’re unable to sleep because of overthinking or anxiety, simply dump all your thoughts in that notebook.

Why it works? 👇 Research shows that journaling can reduce bedtime worry and help people fall asleep faster.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Writing down negative thoughts can also help you process and cope with your emotions, leading to a more restful night's sleep.

Are you an entrepreneur or trying to be one?

All my 66 mental models for founders at one place.

Link below 👇 The book "Mental Models for Startup Founders" is finally finished (yay!)

I released it online for free here: invertedpassion.com/free-book-ment…

Wealth follows power-law (top 1% has more wealth in the world than bottom 99%).

But it’s NOT that the top 1% is significantly more skilled than everyone else. Skill follows normal distribution.

What explains the wealth concentration then?

Turns out - it’s luck. Simulations have shown how being lucky is the topmost attribute of the wealthiest.

It makes sense & I wish more people realise this.

You can increase the surface area of your luck by taking more shots of high upside / low downside opportunities (startups are great at this).

Like the author, I don’t like the term “gamification” but we’re stuck with it.

Gamification implies you can make anything fun by applying points or badges, but that’s not true. This #book expands on that.

Most fun games will remain fun even if you remove points from them. Ultimately most games are fun because they let us practice a skill that’s evolutionarily helpful - chess (strategy), Mario (hand-eye coordination), poker (face reading).

Do you get annual full-body check ups?

This meta-analysis of 230,000 people found “little or no” benefit of these checkups.

In fact, there’s risk involved because of false positives and over diagnosis. The logic is clever: those who get themselves tested proactively are generally careful about their health, and those who need them most seldom get themselves tested.

So, in aggregate, health checks don’t confer benefits.

It’s called inverse care law.

Do you obsess over your productivity?

Here's why it might enslave you.

🧵 1/ After a barrage of recommendations on my twitter, I finally ended up reading @oliverburkeman's Four Thousand Weeks.

The central premise of the #book is simple:

everyone has got about four thousand weeks to live, and spending that limited time chasing efficiency is… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Wealth is not money, it’s the things we use money for.

🧵 1/ As an entrepreneur, money is obviously a massive motivation for why you’re doing what you’re doing.

However, it’s essential to understand that money is not wealth.

How to host great parties.

This short #book talks about how networking sucks and why throwing parties is a much better alternative to it.

My notes in 🧵 1/

Host it on weekday (Tuesday or Wed), as people have commitments on weekends

Set a 2 hour window (7:30-9:30pm types), the short duration allows you to ensure party ends on a high note when everyone is together.