Rankings

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Frieren is comfort food for anime people and it's one of the best animes around for beginners. Lots of nice life lessons and tender moments packed inside an adventure.

Such beautiful prose interwoven with information from books, directors and documentaries. It's all about love and life and the little fluttering butterfly inside our chests as we try to match our weird with anothers weird.

Henrik just stirs thoughts and emotions inside me. He has the unique voice to just pull your innermost being out from its slumbering depths and cut out all the bullshit. After reading his writing others don't come close to evoking the same raw emotional force that he does. Another great piece.

This story is like a winding river with twists and turns that rock your head and question reality but it grips you like Linda!

I must read In Search of Lost Time and Infinite Jest.

Such a great series. I'm definitely going to binge the manga in order to learn how this story ends. Can't wait for another year for the anime.

Oshi No Ko is one of those animes when you read the synopsis seems really shallow but once you get to watch it, you get hooked really fast. Great anime.

10 out of 10 absolute banger. Hilarious and unhinged but also true. Had a ear to ear smile on my face throughout reading.

I had originally started The West Wing couple of years back and left it off around halfway through season 5. I recently started back and finished the whole series from where I left off and I can confidently say it is one of the best written show ever. All the characters, the relationships, the conversations are on another level. It is perhaps not a realistic but idealistic portrayal of the presidency. It infects you with this idealism and motivates you to do better in whatever you do. It's akin to a shot of adrenaline for the curious and hungry.

This was an incredible season. The sloppy animation is gone. The story escalates and multiple characters shine through.

Finished Kingdom season 2. These are the worst seasons of this show in terms of animation quality. The first season was dreadful. The second season is much better but still not great. I've heard great things about season 3 and onwards, so I'm really pumped to continue the series. The story, characters and world building are all going great. I haven't seen such an epic character as Ou Ki since Whitebeard so the author is great at creating memorable characters and stories.

I have been slowly watching Kingdom season 4 and I absolutely love this series. The character progression and dialogue are one of the best. Everything is coming together for a united Middle Kingdom. Can't wait to finish the anime and binge the manga.

This series is goated. Mandatory viewing to military personnel and politicians. Absolute Cinema!

I caught up to the GOAT at last. Time to binge the manga. Kingdom has the worst 1st season I've watched out of all anime, terrible animation quality, decent story though. After season 2 ends everything picks up and the animation catches up. It's now one of my all time favorites. Definitely recommend watching.

This piece is so ahead of its time. This was written in 2020. I especially like the analogy on how "learn to code" can be substituted with "learn to cook". "Many people learn to cook so they can eat better, or more afforably." Coding changed from something marketable and useful to get a job to, now anyone can "learn to code" to create their personal software for whatever they might need. It takes a fraction of the time and needs no coding know-how to get up and running. In our current timeline we have agents who can write this kind of personal software for us on a whim. For example I wanted to log my media consumption and publish it to my website, so I had codex whip up an extension where It takes the URL, title, type and date of the media I'm consuming. I then rate it and if I feel like it write a little note about it. I'm using this extension right now as I'm typing this. I then have it tally up all my media consumption for the week and when I hit "publish to website" it automatically publishes this tally to my website with all the relevant information. Personal software and little projects will be even more relevant as the friction between idea and end product gap narrows with the help of AI. I love technology!

Excellent writing from Gwern on the concept of Guardian Angel AI's and a good tally of the current limitations of LLMs in various areas.

Henrik is intelligent but that word doesn't really explain his brilliance. He's caring in multiple facets. He cares about how he thinks, how he writes and how he feels. All of the previous statements are interlinked. This link is plainly seen when something is written down. A thought, a startup idea an emotion, all of these can be explored transparently once they are written down. Henrik explains the how and why's elegantly in this writing.

I've been a big World of Warcraft fan. I've played Classic, Burning Crusade and Wrath of The Lich King. I thoroughly enjoyed my time and the expansive world blew my away at my young age. I begged my parents to get a subscription to play this game because at that time paying for the game plus paying a monthly fee to play that game was such a novel concept on top of them thinking that games were a waste of time resulted in them viewing WoW as a net negative. Although my incessant please were answered and I got to play the game a few months after launch. I recently played WoW Classic as well and that was an incredible time. I realized why this game meant so much to so many people. I made friends and rivals. Joined the Un'Goro Crater Devilsaur mafia and got reported on the official forums for insider trading. (Hilarious to be repoted for insider trading in a game.) I played Overwatch for hundreds of hours and finally hit Diamond which felt amazing. That's how I got introduced to Jeff from the Overwatch Team. This whole podcast felt like a play-through of my childhood games. Jeff's honesty and bluntness were a breath of fresh air as he can now speak his mind more freely since his exit from Blizzard. The early Blizzard days and the culture surrounding the studio reveals so much about the why and how these games became so successful and more importantly culturally impactful. Created by gamers for gamers and scrutinized to the death on every choice. The rot at current Blizzard can be noticed from miles away but listening to his stories and perspectives of how things shifted in-house was a big confirmation of long suspected (widely known to be fair) cultural and administrative changes post Activision acquisition. (These began probably before the acquisition a la suffering from success.) Very long but highly recommend watching, Jeff's voice is also quite soothing.

This is a really precious series and handles the topic of grief in a mature way. One of the hidden gems of this season.

On the surface this anime might be daunting to get into with a topic such as grief. I'd argue that the main topic isn't grief but difficult decisions and situations. It's moreso about life and continuing to live against everything that gets thrown at you during your journey. I'm grateful this was suggested and I decided to pick it up. I had been looking forward to this series each week. Highly recommend it even if the subject matter doesn't interest you at first glance. You might found something that resonates with you afterward.

This is another major step towards understanding neural networks. First sparse autoencoders now natural language autoencoders with each step comes more understanding but we have yet to fully grasp full dominance over this domain.

If this article looks long to you skip to the chapter "Highly theoretical justifications for having fun" it's well worth the read.

One of the great shows of our era and didn't overstay its welcome which is not a given in our time. I will forever respect Michael Cusack and Zach Hadel for ending the show when they did. If you haven't given Smiling Friends a watch I'd recommend it. 10 minute episodes full of craziness!

"If someone seems boring to you, or a bad fit, it might be that you don’t know how to prompt them, that you haven’t seen them react to the context that brings out their full being. You probably don’t know how much beauty lies hidden in the people around you."

This is a brilliant article. Gonzo journalism mixed with grounded economical evaluation at such a critical time.

This is an exceptional series. It conveys a lot of different philosophies about life, happiness, sadness and letting go. It also emphasizes well how there really isn't a singular answer to any of these things. The pursuit, being on the journey is always more important because there will only be temporary satisfaction at best upon reaching the summit. Thanks Black One and Fushi.

Great article on how Surya Narreddi taught a model to paint watercolor hibiscus paintings with Javascript. Enjoyed the outputs so it was interesting to read on how they achieved these results.

"On Frank Slootman: The company was not built by suffering. Suffering was orthogonal to his judgment and his judgment was better because he was not performing suffering. He was making decisions from a position of clarity that the performance of suffering specifically and structurally prevents. A person who has not slept and has not left a building in over 100 days and has organized his identity around the demonstration of his own endurance is not in a position to make good decisions about anything, including and especially the thing that he is supposedly enduring for." Learning anything requires suffering but making suffering your culture or your identity is nothing to be proud of. You lack discipline, real values, culture and authenticity if you're like this or you enforce these ideals on your employees. Great article, highly recommend reading it.

Incredible production quality, the animation is top notch. I wasn't thinking of watching this but the art and quality is what pulled me in. We'll see if they can keep this up throughout the season.

This is the best series of this season. Villain is a fat-maxxing and kawaii-maxxing sadist what else can be said but WATCH THIS!

Superb art, greatest of this season.