ivan/2024_reading.md

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2024 reading list

Author

ivan commented May 8, 2025 •

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I’m Leslie Lamport from Microsoft Research. I’ve been a researcher most of my adult life, that means I’ve primarily been a writer and also a performer. I’ve written papers and I’ve performed talks at conferences and other venues. I’ve been successful because I’m a pretty good writer.

Good writing will be crucial to your success. The most obvious reason is because people will judge you by your writing, not just by reports or papers that you write, but also by your emails and texts. What does it tell you about a person, if he sends you email with lots of errors, and with sentences that make no sense?

Learning to write well takes practice. You have to think before you write, and then you have to read what you wrote and think about it. And you have to keep rewriting, re-reading and thinking, until it’s as good as you can make it, even when writing an email or a text.

A less obvious reason to improve your writing, is to improve your thinking. You should think before you write. You should think before you do anything, because it will help you understand what you’re doing, which will help you to do it better. And as someone said, “Writing is nature’s way of showing you how fuzzy your thinking is.” If you think you understand something, and don’t write down your ideas, you only think you’re thinking. To think clearly, you need to be able to write down your ideas clearly, which requires being able to write well.

Learning to write well will improve your thinking. And learning to think better, will improve your writing. It’s a virtuous cycle. You have to write better to think better to write better. And you should start that cycle now, by trying to write better.

https://mentors.fm/2019/08/13/think-and-write-with-leslie-lamport/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnY5iJea5ww

Author

ivan commented May 8, 2025 •

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To understand the unknown type, it helps to think about any in terms of assignability. The power and danger of any come from two properties:

All types are assignable to the any type.

The any type is assignable to all other types. (With the exception of never.)

If we “think of types as sets of values”, the first property means that any is a supertype of all other types, while the second means that it is a subtype. This is strange! It means that any doesn’t fit into the type system, since a set can’t simultaneously be both a subset and a superset of all other sets. This is the source of any’s power but also the reason it’s problematic. Since the type checker is set based, the use of any effectively disables it.

The unknown type is an alternative to any that does fit into the type system. It has the first property (any type is assignable to unknown) but not the second (unknown is only assignable to unknown and, of course, any). It’s known as a “top” type since it’s at the top of the type hierarchy. The never type is the opposite: it has the second property (can be assigned to any other type) but not the first (no other type can be assigned to never). It’s known as a “bottom” type.

Effective TypeScript

Author

ivan commented May 8, 2025

I have to admit that I have a suspicion that people who can’t express themselves clearly in writing also aren’t going to be very good at structuring their ideas in code. To me, these abilities are closely correlated.

https://bsky.app/profile/janstette.bsky.social/post/3lon6tix6a22q

Author

ivan commented May 8, 2025

I came to realize something which I should have realized earlier: what I realized is that what we makes stands testament to who we are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLb9g_8r-mE Jony Ive

Author

ivan commented May 9, 2025

Experimental spending on even probabilistic improvements builds up so much value over time.

https://x.com/RomeoStevens76/status/1920937194614571475

Author

ivan commented May 9, 2025

Importing types without type keyword

Due to the nature of type stripping, the type keyword is necessary to correctly strip type imports. Without the type keyword, Node.js will treat the import as a value import, which will result in a runtime error. The tsconfig option [verbatimModuleSyntax][] can be used to match this behavior.

https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/daced4ab98be82953ef2fa73e0f81e2b1967be8b/doc/api/typescript.md

Author

ivan commented May 10, 2025

a simple truth: a lot of current RL research is to translate fuzzy, subjective real-world tasks into objective and unhackable rewards that you can reliably optimize during training

https://x.com/karinanguyen_/status/1921348292694167672

Author

ivan commented May 11, 2025

Mentor (from Greek Μέντωρ) is cognate to Sanskrit mantṛ, a wise & trusted counselor or teacher.

Similar to iatrogenic harm through medical error & negligence, there is pedagogic & mystagogic harm through failing to teach the primacy & the art of asking questions.

https://x.com/hokaisobol/status/1293919065313026048

ivan/2024_reading.md

ivan commented May 8, 2025 • edited Loading

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ivan commented May 9, 2025

Importing types without type keyword

ivan commented May 10, 2025

ivan commented May 11, 2025

ivan commented May 8, 2025 •

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ivan commented May 8, 2025 •

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Importing types without `type` keyword