52/bet on the contrarian ideas that work

Interesting advice from the writer of “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” How to Get Ahead of 99% of People (Starting Today)

1. Have a contrarian Idea
2. Be correct about that Idea
3. Execute on it Massively

Ideas AND execution matters. But not just any idea, but ideas that are true, but obscured for whatever reason. It is for you to uncover it, bet on the idea, and do the work to realize it’s potential.

Contraian ideas are a “a moment in time” ideas. what may be a contrarian idea now might have been conventional years ago. it might be an idea that was “tried and didn’t work out”. contrarian idea does not have to be a “novel idea”.

Contrarian idea in what context? where, when, …?

Bruce Lee’s “Striking Thoughts” also talks about the importance of Ideas.

Have Ideas, find out which ones are correct, and take maximum advantage out of contrarian ideas, because right now they are under used.

Epistemology

Ioannidis, John P. A. “Why most published research findings are false,” 2005. 2 (8)https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124.

LLM

¶Tune Llama3 405B on AMD MI300x (our journey) - Felafax Blog - Obsidian Publish – some jax hype, but HN had some pushback.

Sarmah, Bhaskarjit, Benika Hall, Rohan Rao, Sunil Patel, Stefano Pasquali, and Dhagash Mehta. “HybridRAG: Integrating knowledge graphs and vector retrieval augmented generation for efficient information extraction,” 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.04948.

Programming

¶ What is io_uring? – io_uring is a batched and asynchronous interface. The application submits several syscalls by writing their codes & arguments to a lock-free shared-memory ring buffer. The kernel reads the syscalls from this shared memory and executes them at its own pace. To communicate results back to the application, the kernel writes the results to a second lock-free shared-memory ring buffer, where they become available to the application asynchronously. Related reading: lobste.rs discussion on waiting for many things at once with io_uring, which might have prompted matklad to write the article above.

“Have you tried rubbying a database on it?” or Hytradboi. The 2025 edition might be coming soon. The 2022 edition of Hytradboi has some intereesting talks (all ~10m), like this one – Codebase as database: turning the IDE inside out with datalog by Peter Vilter

While watching the videos above, I noticed that many of the videos appear to be sped up to fit the 10minute window. I wonder if there are software that can automatically speed up / chop off silent periods while being content aware (ie., should not skip through a slide).

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¶ The Python Package Index Should Get Rid Of Its Training Wheels | Loris Cro’s Blog – I think Loris’ second point about using Zig to build platform-native binaries has some merit. It would be a nice followup to show how this could be achieved using ziglang. Some roadblocks

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Added a page on Python’s inline-script-metadata and it’s uses.

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Some Rust Study Links

sirupsen/napkin-math: Techniques and numbers for estimating system’s performance from first-principles via

Rust Script

I was wondering if there was a way to rust programs without compiling it myself first. Essentially, do what jbang does for Java. It appears there is a project called rust-script, that can run Rust files and expressions as scripts without any setup or compilation step. It can wrap main around simple expressions and run them. It can install dependencies mentioned in the comment section of the file “header”, and of course it provides a shebang #!/usr/bin/env rust-script.

Rust Script’s github repo links to scriptisto, which provides a “language agnostic” (how many languages, I do not know), shebang interpreter  that enables you to write scripts in compiled languages. Example shows C language.

From around the web

Phil Eaton says - “Be someone who does things”. How to use consistency to drive the results you want to see for yourself.

The age of average — Alex Murrell; why everything, everywhere all look the same.