Recently, I read this beautiful #book, named Life as No One Knows It, by @Sara_Imari and had a minor revelation that maybe we’ve been looking at life from a completely wrong lens.

My notes 👇 1/ It’s always hard to define life. Everyone has their favorite definition – some describe it as a struggle against entropy, while others describe it as an emergent property of chemicals.

Countless books have been written on the topic, yet we’re far from a consensus.

Don't compete.

🧵 1/ The Internet is full of people winning all the time. Someone is traveling to exotic locations, someone else is raising funds, and another person is winning awards.

Slides from the projects done during Batch 3 of @lossfunk residency.

🧵 1/ Naveen Arulselvan talked about

Can Robots Learn to Drive

drive.google.com/file/d/1fJelK6…

His linkedin: linkedin.com/in/naveen-arul…

Kickstarted Batch 3 of Turing's Dream 6 week AI residency!

Profiles of the current residents 👇 1/ Jayesh @wjayesh is exploring multi-agent systems.

For example, how can you have Devin talk to your cursor agent, and both of them talk to marketing agent.

During the next 6 weeks, he will aim to add one major feature to his open source project

github.com/wjayesh/mahilo

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…

Turing’s Dream first batch is over.

10 people, 10 projects, 6 weeks!

Here's what everyone explored in AI...

🧵 1/ First a teaser of the atmosphere in the hackhouse!

A 3 minute video featuring @NirantK, @dementorSam, @__hsuya and myself (made by @mistrymm7)

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.

Not everything is physics

🧵 1/ This thread is derived from the latest essay I wrote.

You can read it here: invertedpassion.com/not-everything…

Usefulness grounds truth

🧵 1/ This thread is also posted as an essay on my website, so if you prefer read it that way here's the link:

invertedpassion.com/usefulness-gro…

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.