Weeks 07/08 - 07/14

Missed a few weeks oops 😬

News

• Melinda Gates’ new book on women empowerment as means to lift up society

  • Added to reading list

• Waymo completes 10 billion virtual miles in simulation [link]

  • Why important: more training data => better tech

Big ideas

• Don’t try to be an influencer. Try to be a nerd instead

  • Being a nerd pays off
  • Being an influencer is a bad metric for self-worth; some people will never capture another people’s needs or attention; being a nerd is always a winning strategy

• Difference between workaholics and high performers

  • Basically
    • A high performer works hard in healthy sustainable ways and feels happy and inspired.
    • A workaholic works hard in unhealthy unsustainable ways and feels unhappy and burned out.
  • In order to be a high performer
    • Focus on doing business (i.e. perform actions driven by results e.g. create tangible/relevant goals, form strategies/plans, follow through) as opposed to filling up time with busy work (i.e. reading/responding to emails right away instead of batching this appropriately)
    • Have a clear definition of success (seek to improve in areas that matter but know when to stop being a perfectionist)
    • Create own feedback loop instead of relying on external validation from boss, coworkers and clients
    • Be proactive/intentional with time and work (2-3 hours of deep undistracted work - no social media, preferably no disruptive emails/phone calls/meetings)
    • Focus on effort, compare against their best self instead of focusing on income/outcome and comparison against others

• Ryan Holliday “Ego is the enemy” talk at Google

  • Ego is the enemy book
  • Main takeways:
    • We’re all in 1 of 3 phases in life: aspiration, success, failure. In these phases, it is important to recognize where and when ego manifests and reduce its negative impact
      • Side: how to systematically recognize?
    • “Don’t tell yourself a story”: narrative that others paint for you or you paint yourself tends to overpower your ability to objectively judge reality
      • Don’t look at past events in terms of what they say about you as a person; take the right lessons from them
    • “I never look back, except to find out about mistakes… I only see danger in thinking back about things you are proud of.” quote by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann

ML/Data Science

• Illustrated proof of CAP theorem
  • Defs:
    • Consistent: a read operation must return the result of the latest completed write operation
    • Available: every request received by a non-failing node must result in a response
    • Partition tolerant: messages between nodes in the system may be delayed or lost, i.e communication between nodes can be unreliable
  • Important to note: this is oversimplifying CAP - the defs are loose and the “proof” only helps with intuitive high-level understanding; more rigorous treament is presented in this paper

What I am working on

• MOOC: Coursera Deep Learning Specialization courses

  • Course 2 (Hyperparam Tuning, Regularization and Optimization)
  • Course 5 (Sequence Models)

• Technical blog post: word2vec algorithm

• Personal project: figure out book progress tracking and highlights/notes personal web app similar to highlights.sawyerh.com

  • article on how he did it

• Recreational reading:

  • Books I’ve finished:
    • Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
      • Good enjoyable read: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
    • How to American by Jimmy O. Yang
      • Surprisingly good read and lots of relatable moments: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
  • Some books I’m currently working on:
    • Deep Work by Cal Newport (24%)
      
    • Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari (16%)
      
    • The Three-body Problem by Liu Cixin (5%)
      
    • On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (10%)