This page is heavily inspired from gwern.net/notes, it is a collection of things I found interesting enough to store somewhere

Half the challenge of fighting procrastination is the pain of starting—I find when I actually get into the swing of working on even dull tasks, it’s not so bad. So this suggests a solution: never start. Merely have perpetual drafts, which one tweaks from time to time. And the rest takes care of itself.

Technology

Computer science and engineering, Information science, etc

Software Engineering

Why is software engineering such a mess compared to other engineering disciplines ?

One of the first things I thought about is its very immaterial nature: computer systems are far less limited in the growth of their complexity compared to the physical ones that have characterized engineering as a whole for centuries. Such over-linear growth has systematically made our systems grow in their complexity at a much faster rate at which we comprehend them. Computer security is the epitome of such phenomena as security vulnerabilities are all about ¹ leveraging broken assumptions and deeper understanding of the underlying system.

Infosec is all about the mismatch between our intuition and the actual behavior of the systems we build. That makes it harmful to study the field as an abstract, isolated domain. To truly master it, dive into how computers work, then make a habit of asking yourself “okay, but what if assumption X does not hold true?” every step along the way. ~ lcamtuf

Unlike fields such as medicine and lawyers, it is not unheard of practitioners having backgrounds that are all over the place

Quotes

“In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.” ~ John Archibald Wheeler

This quotes is a really interesting answer to a question I don’t know yet

“A very useful heuristic, a potent filter: When someone criticizes you, train to immediately ask yourself: “Would I rather be him/her, or I’d rather be me?” before taking the remark at face value.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source