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Nabeel S. Qureshi Profile
Nabeel S. Qureshi

@nabeelqu

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NYC
Joined November 2010
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
In retrospect this was the best smartphone. High productivity, low addiction. No infinite scroll, no engagement hacking, just messaging with your friends and typing emails very fast with that clicky keyboard. Someone should do a new one.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 month
Yesterday during partial eclipse a friend mentioned it was weird that the city still seemed at full daytime brightness despite 95% of the sun being covered. Fun to see how our senses being logarithmic to external stimuli -- not linear -- shows up in everyday settings
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
Pretty much every smart person I know has a ChatGPT tab open while they work now. Amazing how fast that happened.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
2 years
Honestly just stunned by these Ghibli-style SF images generated by Stable Diffusion
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 month
GPT-2 (2019) vs. GPT-4 (2024) look how beautifully original gpt-2 is! it's like comparing gpt's poetic child drawings vs. corporate emails from middle age.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
4 months
Me going to bed: yay, can’t wait for another night of restful sleep! My brain:
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
10 months
Packed house for Oppenheimer in Copenhagen. Audience gave a little cheer every time Niel Bohr was mentioned.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
2 months
I know it's been said before, but it's such a cool observation that a) lucid dreamers use "look at your hands" to tell if they're in a dream b) AI struggles to render hands correctly In both cases, there's no "higher level" world model correcting things iteratively
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
8 months
I asked a software engineer once what it would cost to build this today. I will never forget his answer: “We can’t, we don’t know how to do it.”
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
11 months
Pre-2023 Zuck: earnestly tries to explain why Meta is good, wears a suit to Congress, donates to schools/hospitals. Everyone hates him. 2023 Zuck: gets jacked, challenges Elon to a fight, stops caring about justifying Meta. Everyone becomes a fan. Funny PR lesson in there.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
5 months
Nice work! Explains why Europe has zero tech industry and so much of its best talent decides they have a brighter future in America.
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Thierry Breton
5 months
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
Wasn't aware of this, but sounds like Scott Aaronson at OpenAI is working on cryptographically watermarking GPT outputs. Means it should be easy enough (in principle) for e.g. teachers to check if students used GPT to do their homework, StackOverflow to check for GPT use, etc.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
Probs obvious, but I think lack of cheap housing in cities is the main thing to blame for most culture getting worse (contemporary novels, indie movies, music, less weird art, etc.) — mostly, the only people who can afford to make a career in this stuff have inherited wealth now.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
2 months
Some people can be massive productivity multipliers on everyone around them:
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
3 months
Useful wisdom: "Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long." (Cesare Pavese)
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
For such a massive company, the speed with which Microsoft shipped GPT integration into Teams (install base of ~270m active users) is insane. This is going to destroy Zoom, Slack, etc. Satya really is amazing.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 month
At the exec level of corporations you can't say "the thing" out loud for political reasons, and this is (sometimes) why orgs like McKinsey get hired: they say "the thing" out loud so nobody has to pay the political cost of doing so, backed by lots of nice graphs and data.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
3 months
So who's working on cryptographic authentication of video? This stuff is going to get crazy -- fast.
@OpenAI
OpenAI
3 months
Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model. Sora can create videos of up to 60 seconds featuring highly detailed scenes, complex camera motion, and multiple characters with vibrant emotions. Prompt: “Beautiful, snowy…
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
'Atlas Shrugged' feels too on the nose lately Vocal altruist turns out to be an evil scammer and steals billions but the media loves him. Meanwhile, *one guy* invents (a) reusable rockets (b) founds OpenAI (c) brings back electric cars (d) Neuralink and... everyone hates him!
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 month
Classic example is hearing -- the piano is an exponential shape because doubling the length of a string gets you 1 octave lower:
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
2 months
Every time I meet an incredible engineer and ask where they're from it turns out to be some random part of the Midwest; what is going on over there
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
7 months
Legendary companies (e.g. Google, Apple) should have in-house company historians whose job it is to write their histories, interview employees/execs, & curate key docs and memos for posterity. So much gets lost otherwise.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 month
Interestingly, children (and some uncontacted tribes) perceive numbers logarithmically; linear only comes with education. This sort of makes evolutionary sense (1 vs 10 vs 100 matters more).
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
We know the genes for ‘short sleepers’ (5 hours instead of 8, no bad side effects); using embryo gene editing, newborns could have these as default setting. Would increase effective human lifespan by ~20%. Seems like a clear EA cause area. 🙃
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
5 years
It's shocking to me how much easier it is to read CS/science papers from the 50s-70s, vs. papers today. Turing 1950 is one of the most important papers *in human history* and it reads like a blog post.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
3 years
- A working mRNA vaccine (first ever in humans!), - Apple M1 chip, - SpaceX rocket launch, - GPT-3, - Tons of cool companies IPO'ing and tons more getting started, - V-shaped recovery - Electric cars - Crypto going mainstream Sure feels like the roaring 20's are starting 🚀
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 month
One of the weirdest things I learned about government is that when their own processes are extremely slow or unworkable, instead of changing those processes, they just make *new* processes to be used in the special cases when you actually want to get something done
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
4 months
Fascinating that Andrew Carnegie wrote this early retirement memo to himself aged 33 ("I will resign business at thirty-five") and then proceeded to ignore it and spend the next three decades brutally dominating the steel industry instead
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 month
This is also why getting outdoor lighting is so important everyday: full daylight will be 10,000+ lux whereas indoors is 100-500 lux, often a 100x+ difference, but your eyes won't notice how much dimmer the indoors is because our senses tend to 'squash' the difference.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
Suddenly, everyone around me is giving up alcohol, fasting, giving to charity, and saying things like "inshallah" and "haram". 2023's vibe seems to be 'Islam'.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
The way we talk about “wtf happened in 1971”, future generations will talk about “wtf happened in 2007”
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
2 months
Random obscure SSC commenter volunteers for COVID origins debate, turns out to be autistic debating genius:
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
6 months
Ouch. Rare to see someone being this publicly frank about problems at a large tech company (here Google):
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 month
Waterloo grads are unbelievably cracked software engineers. Has anyone written up an essay on what they’re doing there? Would be interested to read.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 month
One really cool consequence is that nature evolved two different modes of eyesight: daytime vision is logarithmic, but night vision is closer to linear (so that we can see fine differences at night). These are implemented differently in the eye (rods vs cone cells).
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
4 years
Elon, Kanye and Trump all play the exact same marketing game. It's something like: "trigger" people at the object level, win at the meta level.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
A cursed fact of the world is that the most important life lessons you learn are the hardest to communicate to others. They always sound like clichés.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
6 months
Important: public confirmation that the OpenAI firings were *not* due to malfeasance, financial misconduct, or security incidents. Looks increasingly like this was just a straight-up coup.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
4 months
Thinking habit I've noticed in very smart people: even after you understand something, invest more time finding the tersest, simplest, clearest articulation of it
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
5 months
they’re starting to teach “lowercase tweet-style” on LinkedIn now, it’s over
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@amasad
Amjad Masad
5 months
writing in all lowercase with little punctuation is a status signal kinda like dressing down. see upper class is not bothered by appearing lower class as long as they can differentiate from the middle class who tend to have jobs that require them to dress and write formally.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
2 months
Buddhist monk gets cancer, watches *Ikiru*, realizes he’s been selfish his whole life:
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
NYC is the most hyper-social place I’ve ever lived. It’s the only place where going into hermit mode takes *active effort*; in most other places, hermit mode is the default and you have to bring activation energy to spark a social life, but NYC is somehow default social.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
Tons of reports on HN that GPT-4 has gotten significantly worse. Are people experiencing this?
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 month
"frog with large leaves, hopefully black" is a poem tbh
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
3 months
Striking how the planet’s most valuable companies are all from the American West: 1. MSFT (Seattle): $3.1 trillion 2. Apple (CA): $2.9 trillion 3. NVIDIA (CA): $1.8 trillion 4. Alphabet (CA): $1.8 trillion 5. Amazon (Seattle): $1.8 trillion 6. Meta (CA): $1.2 trillion
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
8 months
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@tszzl
roon
8 months
whichever mf said text is the universal interface was spittin
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
9 months
Why do South Asian parents love saying things like this
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
It is striking how every older person (65+) I talk to nowadays tells me to have as many kids as I possibly can
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
5 months
I'm always surprised by how few people seem to use spaced repetition in practice. Is it: 1) People aren't actually interested in learning/memorizing that many things 2) It's not that valuable / other methods better 3) Apps are too clunky to use 4) Something else?
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
11 months
Spent 2 months in East Asia and now in the middle of 2 months in Western Europe and honestly Asia felt like the more developed place. Kind of broke my old mental model of the world. (Asia more optimistic and more dynamic, too.)
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
4 months
Google vs @Perplexity . Nice illustration of how over-optimizing KPIs ends up ruining internet products.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
6 months
I think you have to aspire to have this level of energy, cultivating good work habits and a sense of urgency about your life; but I do often wonder how much of this is just inborn too:
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 month
The way guitar frets get 'squashed' together as you get closer to the higher notes is another nice illustration -- frets on a guitar are logarithmically spaced. 12th fret is exactly halfway along the string and represents one octave higher than the open string.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
5 months
Europe is in genuinely dire straits and needs to figure out how to create valuable tech companies — rules & regulations are not it. They have the talent…
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
From one of my favorite Hacker News comments ever, by @Jonathan_Blow :
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 month
During daytime the rod cells are completely saturated because of the linearity to brightness so the cone cells pick it up, at nighttime it's mostly the rod cells working. At dusk/dawn/in-between times ("mesopic") both are working together.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
2 months
I genuinely think housing scarcity in/near cities explains 80%+ of the vibecession & the pessimism you encounter when you talk to practically anybody nowadays. It’s way worse than it used to be.
@zachweinberg
Tweets from Zach Weinberg
2 months
The reason everyone feels poor is because of housing prices and nothing else really matters is a view I hold stronger by the day.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
8 months
One thing you learn from Twitter is that educated people *say* they're in favor of being nice to neurodivergent people in theory, but are vicious and mean to real neurodivergent people (Agnes Callard, Aella, Yudkowsky, etc.) in practice
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 month
TLDR: go outside, it's *way* brighter than the indoors. ☀️
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
Love that Donald Knuth saw some ChatGPT responses, played with their implications for a bit, and then went "Ok, that's enough AI stuff, back to binomial coefficients!" That's focus. (via: )
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Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
YC founder friend of mine recently replaced his iPhone with a knockoff BlackBerry (that runs Android) and said it was a massive boost for him. Might try it.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
6 months
If you haven't tried this already, download the app, wear some AirPods, and go for a walk -- it's really good for brainstorming. Example prompt: "I want you to please help me flesh out an essay about [topic]. Ask me questions about the key points, examples, data, and other…
@OpenAI
OpenAI
6 months
ChatGPT with voice is now available to all free users. Download the app on your phone and tap the headphones icon to start a conversation. Sound on 🔊
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
Often surprised by how hard it is for adults to just ask for what they want. I suspect this is aggressively trained out of us in childhood, and many never undo the training. You can ask for a lot as long as you’re ok with being told “no”.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
2 months
It's also cool as hell that you can just say "clarity" in a lucid dream and it'll increase the image quality. Visual prompting!
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
6 months
The Thiel piece is good throughout, but especially striking is when he sits bored through his portfolio company updates & concludes nobody's being ambitious enough
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 month
Nice diagram from the brilliant @JacobSwett :
@JacobSwett
Jacob Swett
1 month
Data can be illuminating! It's really striking how much brighter it often is outside. As @nabeelqu notes our eyes are pretty incredible, but getting a quantitative sense for this can be tricky!
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Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
Steve Jobs was such an incredible communicator. Posting some quotes that struck me from the latest book:
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Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 month
Correctly understood, many external orgs should be best understood as solving these types of coordination problem. Is also why government relies so heavily on consulting firms. If you don't understand this properly, a lot of the behavior makes zero sense from the outside.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
@yishan Roll to disbelieve. You think >50% of humans can’t understand statements like “if it rains tomorrow, we’ll need to change plans”?
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
3 months
Something I'm curious about: why is America so much better at assimilating immigrants than anywhere else?
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
10 months
What is up with this first-born son thing? (from Rhodes, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb")
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
It is strange how tech has ~zero lasting physical monuments compared to past waves of wealth (Morgans, Rockefellers etc.) — just grey office buildings.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
8 months
Housing is a centuries-old technology and should be basically free by now, just like food/water/electricity. It's pure insanity that we've made it a scarce unproductive fake "investment" asset and allowed it to take up an insane amount of people's budgets
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
2 years
All Souls exam questions are so fun
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Nabeel S. Qureshi
2 years
Had no idea Mexico City was so gorgeous. Serious solarpunk vibes ☀️
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
6 months
Struggling to understand how/why 3 people have just torched a literal decade of work -- tooling, infrastructure, processes, all gone. $80bn in value set on fire, and still zero explanation. It's bizarre.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
I’m struck by how much more *weirdness* the 60s seemed to have — the Beats, hippies, LSD/free love, Dylan/Beatles/whatnot, and it seems that all of that stuff could only have arisen in a condition where people could afford rent in the city with relative ease
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
5 months
Hard to imagine now, but I suspect we will end up viewing these last few years before the dawn of true AGI with intense nostalgia
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
Left: Chomsky's critique of LLMs Right: I try one of his examples on ChatGPT The LLM critiques I've seen from linguists are weak, and easily disproven by spending 5 minutes playing around with these tools. Disappointing!
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
Many bad habits (time-wasting, procrastination) are downstream of not feeling viscerally enough that life is short
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
I used to do “read 52+ books” as a resolution, but then I realized: my most rewarding reading experiences were when I went deep on a single book, sometimes for months. So now I try and read fewer books deeply, and really understand them.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
6 months
This was a seriously good listen on the detailed mechanics of government. e.g. anecdote that sounds insane: government hires consultants for millions of $ to do a study on whether to use Google Docs or Microsoft Teams. 5 years & counting, no decision made.
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@dwarkesh_sp
Dwarkesh Patel
6 months
My interview with Dominic Cummings ( @Dominic2306 ) on why Western governments are so dangerously broken, and how to fix them before an even more catastrophic crisis. Dominic was Chief Advisor to the Prime Minister during COVID, and before that, director of Vote Leave (which…
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
Every tech person in San Francisco is either unemployed or works at OpenAI
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Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
Once heard Sam Altman say that if he wasn’t doing OpenAI he’d fund 100 young people $250K/year for 10 years in exchange for the right to invest in what they build. Would be cool to see that exist.
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Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
Note that this would not work for an open source model — it relies on OpenAI having the private key for the pseudorandom function being used, and a malicious actor could simply remove the watermarking from an open source model. So the problem remains, once open source catches up.
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Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
Amusing to realize: if electricity were invented today, it would have a vocal minority of haters on Twitter. - “What if your house burns down” - “Tech bros want to take away our candles” - “Hi, candlemaker here! Electricity is irresponsible and dangerous” etc.
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Nabeel S. Qureshi
8 months
Something has gone deeply wrong in the news media when we have cars that can literally drive themselves on the streets in a major US city -- objectively a miracle -- and 99% of news articles about this amazing technological advance are negative.
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
11 months
Curious for takes on this: why aren't there more successful education startups? Is it just a bad market?
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
2 years
Peter Thiel on AI in 2012. Impressive, given that almost nobody thought this at the time
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Nabeel S. Qureshi
24 days
Your true power level is typically higher than whatever level you're operating at, and one way to get better is to create conditions that force you to raise your power level or die trying. Doing this recursively is called "ambition".
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Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
Are there any concrete visions/narratives for technology over the next 20-30 years that people have found exciting or interesting? Feels like the last 20 years were obvious (computers in pockets, internet for all) and the next 20 years are a narrative vacuum (AI -> ?).
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Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 month
Of course, in the best orgs you *can* say "the thing" out loud, and this is why the most competent orgs probably don't hire McKinsey (and similar companies) too often, at least for this type of use case
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
2 years
I know it's been said before, but most people seriously underestimate how easy it is to cold email people and how impactful that can be. Confidently sending cold emails/DMs is a life-changing skill
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
4 years
Magnus Carlsen on the banality of excellence: "I am convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became world champion is that he is too clever for that...His enormous powers of understanding and his constant thirst for knowledge distracted him from chess."
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
5 months
I’m convinced the long run net effect of caffeine on productivity is ~0, but the main reason I drink a lot of coffee is that the morning cup of coffee is a top 5 daily life experience
@GrantSlatton
Grant Slatton
5 months
It brings me no pleasure to report that quitting all caffeine significantly improved my sleep, and I feel more energized than I ever did with coffee This is a huge blackpill and infohazard, I know, I am sorry
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Nabeel S. Qureshi
2 months
@krishnanrohit @AmazonKindle I stopped buying Kindle books a long time ago once I realized how weird the concept of 'ownership' is on Amazon digital
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@nabeelqu
Nabeel S. Qureshi
3 months
The unreasonable effectiveness of just staring at the data:
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Nabeel S. Qureshi
1 year
@0xhexhex Median screen time per person is *significantly* higher today than it was in the BB era. I doubt you'd dispute that.
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