Wisereads Vol. 99 — The Inner Compass by Lawrence Yeo, Adam Walker on Reading in Slow Motion, and more
Last week, we featured an excerpt of The Magic of Code, a love letter to computing by Samuel Arbesman. This week, we're sharing an exclusive five-chapter preview of Lawrence Yeo's debut book, The Inner Compass: Cultivating the Courage to Trust Yourself.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
Writing Code Was Never The Bottleneck
Writing from Portugal, PagerDuty engineer Pedro Tavares urges developers to be deliberate about code quality, no matter how it’s produced. "With LLMs making it easy to generate working code faster than ever, a new narrative has emerged: that writing code was the bottleneck, and we’ve finally cracked it. But that’s not quite right. The marginal cost of adding new software is approaching zero, especially with LLMs. But what is the price of understanding, testing, and trusting that code? Higher than ever."
being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
Witty and clear-eyed, Northwestern PhD student Maalvika dissects productive procrastination and the artist’s fear of beginning. "The moment you begin to make something real, you kill the perfect version that lives in your mind. Creation is not birth; it is murder. The murder of the impossible in service of the possible."
What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?
ChatGPT may have upended education, but where does that leave professors still trying to teach students how to write—and students increasingly leaning on LLMs to do it for them? Bard College professor Hua Hsu offers one answer. "Education, particularly in the humanities, rests on a belief that, alongside the practical things students might retain, some arcane idea mentioned in passing might take root in their mind, blossoming years in the future. A.I. allows any of us to feel like an expert, but it is risk, doubt, and failure that make us human. I often tell my students that this is the last time in their lives that someone will have to read something they write, so they might as well tell me what they actually think."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
The Untold Story of Peter Thiel and Founders Fund (ft. Mario Gabriele)
In his Hyperlegible series, Packy McCormick interviews standout internet essayists; his latest guest is Mario Gabriele, whose four-part deep dive on Founders Fund reveals how Peter Thiel’s talent-spotting produced unprecedented returns. "Mike Solana had a great quote where he talked about the way to escape competition is through a through authenticity... In fact, when I asked almost everyone at the fund what their big lesson from Peter was, it was like you just have to focus on your comparative advantage at the expense of everything else. And that's another way of saying that in a sense."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
Ok, a few reflections on the book
Nabeel S. Qureshi reflects on Nadia Asparouhova’s Antimemetics, her exploration of high-impact ideas that seldom spread. "Original ideas are inherently antimemetic: they're very hard to transmit at first because you don't have the right language to talk about them, and they're easy to forget. This is why so few people have them at all. The most important ideas start as antimemes."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
Alice’s Adventures In A Differentiable Wonderland
In his hefty primer on neural-network design, researcher Simone Scardapane guides Alice-like newcomers into the wonderland of differentiable primitives. "By viewing neural networks as simply compositions of differentiable primitives we can ask two basic questions... First, what data types can we handle as inputs or outputs? And second, what sort of primitives can we use? Differentiability is a strong requirement that does not allow us to work directly with many standard data types, such as characters or integers, which are fundamentally discrete and hence discontinuous. By contrast, we will see that differentiable models can work easily with more complex data represented as large arrays."
Hand-picked book of the week
The Inner Compass
We’re trained to seek validation and approval, only to find ourselves caught in the tensions and crises that arise whenever we heed someone else’s voice. Enter The Inner Compass, where Lawrence Yeo serves as a personal guide through the labyrinth of the inner world, showing how courage and intuition chart the surest course to a life well-lived.
"When your compass is at true north, you have conviction in who you are. You’re aware that uncertainty is inevitable, but it’s a source of empowerment rather than fear. The fact that you can’t predict what happens next is seen as a feature of life, and not a bug. After all, if everything was knowable, there would be no room for curiosity to emerge. Curiosity is being grateful that there’s more to uncover, which is what drives the conviction to explore."
We’re thrilled that Lawrence—the whimsical voice (and pen) behind More to That—is sharing an exclusive five-chapter preview with Wisereads readers. If you enjoy the preview, you can pick up a full copy of his debut, available now.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Adam Walker
Harvard lecturer Adam Walker shares his passion for how poetry renews our sense of the sacred in his Substack packed with literary insights. From Reading in Slow Motion: "Literature does more than simply make us more empathetic. It dilates our moral capacity, enriches our enjoyment of life, sharpens our attention, and enlarges our ability to communicate, solve problems, celebrate, lament communally, and to imagine a more just society. But the gifts of good literature depend upon how we read."