A weekly serving of 7 things for you to savor

Tis’ the season to be thankful

Thank you for reading! I appreciate your time and attention, and I don't take it for granted.

In years past I've posted some links to things which I pay for—if I'm not paying for something, then I'm probably the product being sold. So I prefer to pay for things when I can (when I'm able and when paying directly is possible.) Here are few things I use, which I pay for: Hindenburg, Overcast, Reeder, Feedbin, Tower, Transmit, OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, iaWriter, Discourse, Basecamp, Bluehost, Hover, Zencastr, Zoom, Otter, Mailchimp, Substack, Supercast, and Front.

The quality of your mind

You determine the quality of your mind by the nature of your daily thoughts. If they circle around the same obsessions and dramas, you create an arid and monotonous mental landscape, and this secretly makes you miserable. Instead, you must seek to radiate your mind outward, to unleash your imagination and intensify your experience of life. […] You are in fact surrounded every day by endless marvels, and to the degree you let them into your daily consciousness, you expand your mind and reinvigorate its immense powers.

~ Robert Greene

Average, or worst?

Over the last few years, deep-learning-based AI has progressed extremely rapidly in fields like natural language processing and image generation. However, self-driving cars seem stuck in perpetual beta mode, and aggressive predictions there have repeatedly been disappointing. Google's self-driving project started four years before AlexNet kicked off the deep learning revolution, and it still isn't deployed at large scale, thirteen years later. Why are these fields getting such different results?

~ Alyssa Vance from, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/28zsuPaJpKAGSX4zq/humans-are-very-reliable-agents

This makes the interesting distinction between average–case performance, and worst–case performance. People are really good by both measures (click through to see what that means via Fermi approximations.) AI (true AI, autonomous driving systems, language models like GPT-3, etc.) is getting really good on average cases. But it's the worst–case situations where humans perform reasonably well… and current AI fails spectacularly.

Kino Lorber

Go to this YouTube channel: Kino Lorber, click Playlists and then view the Free Documentaries (80 feature-length films) or the Free Movies on Demand playlist (145 films.) Kino Lorber is an international film distribution company; I thought it was a person when I first heard mention of this.

Now try this experiment: Pick a documentary (try Filmworker if you know who Stanley Kubrick is, M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity if you have eyes, or Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil if painting is more your thing.) Watch the movie. Then reflect on the experience of watching a feature–length documentary, versus say, modern "serial" shows. I've relearned just how bad modern entertainment can be, when I reminded myself just how good film can be. (Surprise bonus-round: Watch The Atomic Café and be gobsmacked, horrified, and… some-other-feeling-I-can't-quite-find-the-right-word-for in repeated cycles.)

Sunset

Every time you wake up and ask yourself, "What good things am I going to do today?" remember that, when the sun goes down at sunset, it will take a part of you life with it.

~ Indian proverb

Take some time to reflect

On your deathbed, you would do anything, pay anything for one more ordinary evening. For one more car ride to school with your children. For one more juicy peach. For one more hour on a park bench. Yet here you are, experiencing any number of those things, and rushing through it. Or brushing it off. Or complaining about it because it’s hot or there is traffic or because of some alert that just popped up on your phone. Or planning some special thing in the future as if that’s what will make you happy. You can’t add more at the end of your life…but you can not waste what’s in front of you right now.

~ Ryan Holiday from, https://ryanholiday.net/35-lessons-35-years-old/

This blog started initially as a place for me to post a eulogy, and then it grew to serve many more purposes. It's now solidly a way for me to reflect, and to work with the garage door up. Discovery, reflection, and efficacy are pretty frickin' important to me and keeping up with the 'ol bloggin' forces me to keep up with daily discovery and reflection. I've a bunch of other processes beyond this blog.

It's a rare post where I both have a point and state it explicitly: Whether you go off to Holiday's article and follow that thread, follow my links in this email or this post, or my series teaching daily reflection matters not. It only matters that you take time to reflect.