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Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959 Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself....

The world I live in Mary Oliver I have refused to live locked in the orderly house of reasons and proofs. The world I live in and believe in is wider than that. And anyway, what’s wrong with Maybe? You wouldn’t believe what once or twice I have seen. I’ll just tell you this: only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one. A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us....

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” – André Gide “It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.” – Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Today Adam Wolff tweeted a story about deugging FB-Chat. He is a technical fellow at Electric Capital. Below is it. Before the major effort to redo the UI, FB Chat was super broken and we had no idea why. We didn’t know what was wrong, but we knew the code was a mess. We set about rewriting both the front-end and the back-end in an effort to fix it. The front-end rewrite pulled in a whole team of amazing engineers and became one of the big threads that led to reactjs....

To navigate life we create mental models of the world out there, and then we confuse the models for reality. What is the explore/exploit tradeoff? The gambler needs to learn new knowledge about the machines and simultaneously use what they have already learned to optimize their decisions. In the literature, these two activities are referred to as exploring and exploiting. You can’t do both things at the same time. When you explore, you are pulling new arms on the bandit trying to figure out their expected payout....