the gist

"In my experience, having a technical understanding of the range of related [machine-learning]..."

Mon, 07 May 2012 09:00:32 -0400

“In my experience, having a technical understanding of the range of related [machine-learning] problems can inspire product ideas that might not occur to someone without this understanding. To draw a loose analogy, it’s like architecture. So much of the construction of a bridge is constrained by material resources and physics that it doesn’t make sense to have people without that technical background design a bridge.”

- Aria Haghighi, What it takes to build great machine learning products

"Newspapers asked, ‘Is it a drug? Is it harmless? Is it dangerous?’ That ambivalence is so important...."

Sun, 06 May 2012 09:01:10 -0400

“Newspapers asked, ‘Is it a drug? Is it harmless? Is it dangerous?’ That ambivalence is so important. The most dangerous thing for a branded product is low interest.”

- Dietrich Mateschitz, via Red Bull’s Billionaire Maniac

Roger bows to his robot overlord (Taken with Instagram at MIT...

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 15:21:48 -0400

Roger bows to his robot overlord (Taken with Instagram at MIT Media Lab (E-14))

"[Sotheby’s] essay copy is mostly a formality, but it plays a role in the auction house’s overall..."

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 09:00:05 -0400

“[Sotheby’s] essay copy is mostly a formality, but it plays a role in the auction house’s overall marketing strategy. The more text given to an individual piece, the more the house seems to value it. I sprinkled about twenty adjectives (“fey,” “gestural,” “restrained”) amid a small repertory of active verbs (“explore,” “trace,” “question” ). I inserted the phrases “negative space,” “balanced composition,” and “challenges the viewer” every so often. […] Pulp was exactly what I was writing. It was embarrassingly easy, and might have been the only truly dishonest part of the Sotheby’s enterprise. In most ways, the auction house is unshackled from intellectual pretense by its pure attention to the marketplace. Through its catalogue copy (and for a time, through me), it makes one small concession to the art world’s native tongue.”

- Alice Gregory, On the Market

This native tongue, is it Jibberish?

"The problem is not so much to repress such-and-such a passion, as it is to learn to see things..."

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 09:00:05 -0400

“The problem is not so much to repress such-and-such a passion, as it is to learn to see things “from above,” in the grandiose perspective of universal nature and of humanity, compared to which many passions may appears ridiculously insignificant. It is then that rational knowledge may become force and will, and thereby become extremely efficacious.”

- Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, pg. 284

"The implications are extraordinary. If, in all sectors of society, women are on the ascent, and if..."

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 09:00:05 -0400

“The implications are extraordinary. If, in all sectors of society, women are on the ascent, and if gender parity is actually within reach, this means that a marriage regime based on men’s overwhelming economic dominance may be passing into extinction.”

- Kate Bolick, All the Single Ladies @ The Atlantic

"Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears..."

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 09:00:06 -0400

“Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists.”

- Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, pg. 272

Cereal bowls. Reminder to “dogfood” your product or...

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 08:34:47 -0400

Cereal bowls. Reminder to “dogfood” your product or service. (Taken with Instagram at Sonar Intergalactic HQ)

"…every time we think about the past we are delicately transforming its cellular representation..."

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 09:00:05 -0400

“…every time we think about the past we are delicately transforming its cellular representation in the brain, changing its underlying neural circuitry. It was a stunning discovery: Memories are not formed and then pristinely maintained, as neuroscientists thought; they are formed and then rebuilt every time they’re accessed”

- Jonah Lehrer, The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever

Cunninlynguists - My Habit (I Haven’t Changed)

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:00:06 -0500

Cunninlynguists - My Habit (I Haven’t Changed)

Gil Scott-Heron - Running

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 09:00:05 -0500

Gil Scott-Heron - Running

The Streets - Cinema Barz (ft. Jammer) “Why would I be...

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 09:05:06 -0500

The Streets - Cinema Barz (ft. Jammer)

“Why would I be hungry for a younger year? I’m 1978 years younger than the current year.”

"You know what’s great about New York? The threshold for citizenship as a New Yorker is actually..."

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 09:01:05 -0500

“You know what’s great about New York? The threshold for citizenship as a New Yorker is actually pretty short. Like, if you come to New York and you still like it two years after you arrive here and you still think its great and you’re having a good time and you haven’t been totally ground down and go limping back to wherever the fuck you came from…you know what? You’re in.”

- Anthony Bourdain in his new show, “The Layover“ (via alittlespace)

Reks - Limelight

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 09:01:06 -0500

Reks - Limelight

"For great is the power of arguing and the faculty of persuasion, and particularly if it should be..."

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 09:05:05 -0500

“For great is the power of arguing and the faculty of persuasion, and particularly if it should be much exercised, and also receive additional ornament from language: and so universally, every faculty acquired by the uninstructed and weak brings with it the danger of these persons being elated and inflated by it. For by what means could one persuade a young man who excels in these matters that he ought not to become an appendage to them, but to make them an appendage to himself? Does he not trample on all such reasons, and strut before us elated and inflated, not enduring that any man should reprove him and remind him of what he has neglected and to what he has turned aside?”

- Epictetus, Why Not Sophistry?

"For 30 years now, he has lived a monkishly regimented life, each facet of which has been precisely..."

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 09:00:06 -0400

“For 30 years now, he has lived a monkishly regimented life, each facet of which has been precisely engineered to help him produce his work. He runs or swims long distances almost every day, eats a healthful diet, goes to bed around 9 p.m. and wakes up, without an alarm, around 4 a.m. — at which point he goes straight to his desk for five to six hours of concentrated writing. (Sometimes he wakes up as early as 2.) He thinks of his office, he told me, as a place of confinement — “but voluntary confinement, happy confinement.””

- The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami

"…inspections are a cheaper method of finding bugs than testing; according to Basili and Selby..."

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 09:01:05 -0400

“…inspections are a cheaper method of finding bugs than testing; according to Basili and Selby (1987), code reading detected 80 percent more faults per hour than testing, even when testing programmers on code that contained zero comments. This went against the intuition of the professional programmers, which was that structural testing would be the most efficient method.”

- Kevin Burke, Why code review beats testing: evidence from decades of programming research

Lil Wayne - 6 Foot 7 Foot (Feat. Cory Gunz) “Woman of my...

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 09:03:06 -0400

Lil Wayne - 6 Foot 7 Foot (Feat. Cory Gunz)

“Woman of my dreams, I don’t sleep so I can’t find her”

Pains me to hear it.

"What’s the potential power of the entrepreneur’s simple leap of faith? The success of a..."

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 09:36:05 -0400

“What’s the potential power of the entrepreneur’s simple leap of faith? The success of a single business has a significant payoff for the economy. Looking back over the 25 years since our company went public, Schwab has collectively generated $68 billion in revenue and $11 billion in earnings. We’ve paid $28 billion in compensation and benefits, created more than 50,000 jobs, and paid more than $6 billion in aggregate taxes.”

- Charles Schwab, Every Job Requires an Entrepreneur

"Dr Bartels and Dr Pizarro then correlated the results from the trolleyology [studying ethics using..."

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 09:36:06 -0400

“Dr Bartels and Dr Pizarro then correlated the results from the trolleyology [studying ethics using contrived life-or-death scenarios] with those from the personality tests. They found a strong link between utilitarian answers to moral dilemmas… and personalities that were psychopathic, Machiavellian or tended to view life as meaningless. Utilitarians, this suggests, may add to the sum of human happiness, but they are not very happy people themselves.”

- The Economist, Moral philosophy: Goodness has nothing to do with it