Physicist: 31, 331, 3331, 33331, 333331, 3333331, and 33333331 are all prime, so the pattern must continue. Mathematician: Careful, patterns can be deceptive. You need a rigorous proof for such a claim. Data scientist: None of this is making any money.

To get rich, do work where you get paid in proportion to the number of customers you satisfy instead of the number of hours you work. Not all work of this kind will make you rich, but nearly all work that can make you rich is of this kind.

In large organizations compliance is often rewarded more than success. Founders should avoid the challenges of large organizations for as long as possible.

Being a math professor is like, "Here is this carefully crafted beautiful piece of math that is the epiphany of centuries of intellectual investigation." Student: is this on the test?

professor: ... you've ... installed python before? student: no, this is my first time professor: your envs are isolated per project. who taught you to do that? student: it seemed the right way professor: *muttering* he shall know your ways as though born to them

I find it funny when people complain about “difficult people”. I feel like my whole life has been focused on how to work best with “difficult people”. It’s my professional moat. In my experience, all truly capable people are difficult in some way. Deal with it!

Mathematicians watching physicists do math

TypeScript dev watching JavaScript dev fixing “cannot read properties of undefined”

my hardware-programmer father has lectured me about "software programmers getting lazier faster than CPUs getting faster" we have these GHz CPUs, and tens of GB of RAM, but if the software gets less efficient faster than the hardware improving; then old tech seems "snappy"

it’s never “hi!” or “how are you?” it’s always: “prod is down”

If your opponents are opportunists, one way to beat them is to outlast them. Opportunists almost by definition lack staying power.

in life there are two things that are unavoidable: death and engineers chronically underestimating how hard something is

Sebastian Aaltonen Okay, this should be to scale, with each pixel that the bar is long being 500 MFLOP/s (at FP32). (I made the RTX 4090 one had to snake back and forth the right amount, rather than just going to an abstract stack of paper.)

Random thoughts: The most important thing to teach kids is that they can achieve anything if they dream big and work hard.

Steve Jobs email he sent himself 13 months before he died. Whenever I re-read this, I regret waiting so long to have read it again.

Life is all about learning by doing.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

When I was a student, I was amazed to learn that mechanical and electrical systems satisfy the same differential equations. The fact that the systems are ANALOGOUS is why a circuit designed to model a physical system is called an ANALOG system.