Anni's Blogs

This page is a log of all the videos, articles, podcasts and other media that I consume. It is loosely inspired from Mason Wang's Notion-Database-esque "bookshelf".

Some of these things have shaped me.

• The Man Who Fooled The World (Alfred Nobel)

  • Built his fortune by conquering the chemical properties of Nitroglycerin.
  • Alfred Nobel's father invented the sea-mine?
  • Left his fortune to the creation of the Nobel Prize.

• The Most Misunderstood Concept in Physics (Entropy)

  • Life is the most effective way to convert low-entropy energy into high-entropy energy. (This blew my mind.)

• I Tried the World's Simplest Productivity Trick (it worked)

  • Lucas either works or stares at a wall when he feels like he cannot work. No screens. No YouTube, YouTube Studio, G-Mail, WhatsApp- Nothing.
  • Basically inhabiting the "in-between"
  • Something about seeing his week and such a raw account of everything made something click for me.
  • I like one of the top most comments: Bro accidentally discovered meditation. Hilarious.

• LIGO

• Cosmic Dawn (JWST)

  • A first hand account of the trials and tribulations that went in towards building the James Webb Space Telescope.
  • Gave me a front seat view into what "Global Science" looks like and how we as a species are trying to solve some of the hardest problems ever.

• AlphaFold - The Most Useful Thing AI Has Ever Done

  • AlphaFold sped up Science by 100s of decades. An entire PhD could've been spent trying to find the structure of a single Protein. AlphaFold did it instantly.
  • Learnt about the The Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP) challenge. This is basically ImageNet but for biologists.

• Your Brain: Who's in Control? | Full Documentary | NOVA | PBS

  • Learnt about the Pre-Frontal Cortex, the Visual Cortex, the Motor Cortex
  • Learnt about the Split Brain Experiment, Sleep Walking and the "illusion of choice" (our subconscious mind is truly running the show)

Great Talks:

• Natalie Portman Harvard Commencement Speech | Harvard Commencement 2015

  • Do work that you enjoy.

• Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

  • This is pop-culture at this point.
  • You can never connect the dots going forward. But when you look back, it'll all make sense.
  • Stay Hungry Stay Foolish.

• Admiral McRaven addresses the University of Texas at Austin Class of 2014

  • Make your bed.
  • And 11 other points I can't recall now. But it's timeless advice and it hits hard.
  • Some fundamental truths distilled from a lifetime in 20 minutes.

• Jen-Hsun Huang: Stanford student and Entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA

  • A conversation between Huang and an auditorium of Stanford MBA students.

• Randy Pausch's Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

  • A lifetime packed into a lecture. Very touching and special.

• Elon Musk: Digital Superintelligence, Multiplanetary Life, How to Be Useful

  • Elon spoke at the SF YC Startup School.
  • The sentence that hit me the hardest: Close the RL loop of reality. Most of us "see what we want to see" or live in some imagined universe in our brain.
  • We don't "update" our beliefs based on raw observations of how the world actually is. This is a flaw. I think this is because admitting your reality is hard. It requires a certain level of humility and self-awareness. Most people don't like to admit that they're dumb or wrong.
  • But if you don't close the "RL-loop-of-reality" i.e. if you don't make an accurate diagnosis of your current "state" then your next "action" will be flawed.
  • Also philosophy says that we should "have a purpose" or "have a goal we're striving towards" and that literally is the Reward Function. So, the RL analogy is a very very clean Razor to cut through the "fog" that most people find themselves in.

• Fei-Fei Li: Spatial Intelligence is the Next Frontier in AI

  • Another talk at the SF YC Startup School.
  • The Cambrian Explosion. What's going on at World Labs.
  • Her journey from Princeton to creating ImageNet and anecdotes of her reaction to AlexNet (super cool).
  • Briefly touched upon life in the Industry vs life in Academia and how she oscillates between the two.
  • How in Science, one must find north stars (read: extremely hard and ambitious goals) and go after them.

• J.K. Rowling Harvard Commencement Speech | Harvard University Commencement 2008

  • A common theme in commencement speeches is this: the speaker can't remember a word their own commencement speaker said - so there's "no pressure". Bhargav Dasgupta (Managing Director and CEO of ICICI Lombard) at IIM-Bangalore in 2014, and Admiral McRaven at UT Austin, expressed the same sentiment when addressing their graduating classes.
  • "There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction"
  • "You will never truly know yourself or the strength of your relationships until both have been tested by adversity"

Nice Blogs

Personal Blogs of People:

• https://matt.might.net/
• https://www.vedant.space/
• https://masonjwang.com/writing
• https://hermitage.utsob.me/
• https://parentheticallyspeaking.org/ and https://cs.brown.edu/people/sk/Memos/
• https://yauhen.xyz/notes/
• https://www.susanrigetti.com/
• https://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

Technical Stuff:

• https://lilianweng.github.io/
• https://karpathy.github.io/ and https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/
• https://www.tensortonic.com/ml-math

Specific Posts:

• https://csrankings.org/advice.html
• https://thoughtforms.life/what-advice-do-i-give-to-my-students/
• https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1870876338178887869.html?utm_campaign=topunroll
• https://medium.com/@black_51980/writing-a-good-scientific-paper-c0f8af480c91