Linda Tong

Quotes

Ken Liu Notes and Annotations on The Fellowship of the Ring

"And so all great books are written in dead languages. The passage of time erodes them, tests them, filters them until what limited them to their times have been striped away, leaving behind only what is eternal, universal, lasting: Humanity expressed in a single voice, Life embodied in a single soul. That core is self-translating, self-generating, self-renewing."

Greg Brockman How I became a machine learning practitioner

"What turned out to be my biggest blocker was a mental barrier — getting ok with being a beginner again... I’d known that software engineers with solid fundamentals in linear algebra and probability can become machine learning engineers with just a few months of self study. But somehow I’d convinced myself that I was the exception and couldn’t learn. But I was wrong — even embedded in the middle of OpenAI, I couldn’t make the transition because I was unwilling to become a beginner again."

"You’re probably not an exception either. If you’d like to become a deep learning practitioner, you can. You need to give yourself the space and time to fail. If you learn from enough failures, you’ll succeed — and it’ll probably take much less time than you expect."

Ken Liu The Paper Menagerie

"Who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts I had in my mind as I typed them? We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe. And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me."

"Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly."

Ira Glass The Gap

"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you...and if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."

Steve Schwarzman What It Takes

"I advise you, if you have any interest in politics whatsoever, to go out and make as much money as you can. That will give you independence if you ever decide you want to go into politics."

Vergil Aeneid