Never reading about consciousness again

Engelbart correctly makes a lot of predictions in workplace management software (CoDIAK). It reminds me a lot of Notion and other similar tools that aim to provide a single interface to many distributed knowledge bases. Reading his thesis explains a lot of why bloat can occur, and why managing large groups can get so complex. I thought that it was interesting as to how he necessitated the approach of a global vocabulary control -- which I feel like now is unneeded given natural language interfaces provided by artificial intelligence. Reading Engelbart's essay makes me believe that greater tools will enable us to become more effective at our work. Sometimes I hear a lot of AI doomerists talk about how our work will get replaced. I find this unsatisfying to hear. I personally believe that 90% of the world's software is yet to be built, and 99% of the world's software is yet to be improved upon.

I have only read roughly 75% of this book. This was such a tough read for me. I felt way smarter after reading it though. I would highly recommend it to anyone.

This was a short read, but was very intense to follow through. Camus's style of writing paints scenes in the story so vividly in my head despite it being written in first person in the eyes of nihilistic Meursault. Meursault is also inherently absurdist, and it was a perspective I have never really thought about in the eyes of the beholder. To me what was most gut clenching was his apathetic consistency towards his [Spoiler - click to reveal].

I initially read this book when I was a sophomore in high school and I didn't really think much of it. Probably my thoughts at the time were that it thought too dramatically about life. I've started to think more about my life in terms of how I value meaning in everything. This book really emphasizes how important everything is, and how much I don't choose to ignore my own heart + gut feelings. I would highly recommend this book to anyone at any point in their life. It really made me rethink a lot of how I view my goals, love etc. When I felt overly stressed out, reading it was one of the few things that would help me reground myself in my environment. It helped me view my daily life as how it is, and allowed me to romanticize it too. I hope that my words can fully express just how much this book means to me.

The book discusses the various challenges that you encounter when deploying ML systems to prod, starting from data collection all the way down to deployment.

Your effort = your intelligence

We are literally optimizing society like a CPU. I learned a lot about the sharing economy in that it takes advantage of underutilized assets to make productive gains. There is a lot more that goes on to platforms like Uber, Airbnb, Etsy, etc. than I thought there were.

I learned a lot about major technological innovations, and how the markets reacted to them.

Extremely captivating, changed my thought process on what constitutes meaningful innovation. There should be a reconnect between engineers and government. Furthermore we should rethink about why it is we, as engineers, outright oppose military work, and whether we hold any biases in this view.

I would only recommend the chapter talking about different portfolio models.

Helped me gain a very good fundamental understanding of how networking works. Ultimately did not finish the last few chapters of the book but was overall very useful.

Read half of this book, should probably read the rest when it is necessary but am not focusing on other stuff.