Join 📚 Josh Beckman's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Josh's read, .
As with p values, having a bright-line threshold, causes curious behavior. In this case, scoring below 30 on any subject (a 30 or above is required in every subject) and failing the exam has arbitrary negative effects for people, so teachers usually try to prevent people from failing if there's an easy way to do it, but a deeper root of the problem is the idea that it's necessary to produce a certification that's the discretization of a continuous score.
Suspicious Discontinuities
danluu.com
We want AI agents that can discover like we can, not which contain what we have discovered. Building in our discoveries only makes it harder to see how the discovering process can be done.
The Bitter Lesson
incompleteideas.net
Good architecture is built incrementally, but **not** designed incrementally. The [active-active, sharded architecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8NWDHgWA28) that powers Shopify today was drawn on a whiteboard in 2014 (not designed incrementally), and it took ~6 years to fully materialize, with a major customer-facing milestone every year (built incrementally). We would’ve hit a local maxima if we had not intentionally spelled this out.
The Napkin Math Methodology for System Design
sirupsen.com
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise