Good prompts

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Here are some prompts saved from twitter.

The consensus opinion is that prompt engineering is a useless endeavour, because any gains must soon be eaten up by more fundamental improvements to the model. This may be true, but I would still be pleasantly surprised if Socratic questioning became the default model response to a request for tutoring in the presence of anything more than the mildest profit incentive. It’s often not pleasant to realize how little you truly understand. And regardless, I think this page will make for a cool time capsule.

iOS suggestions

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Books

Make learning while reading delightful:

The dictionaries could be expanded to include more loanwords, obscure words, phrases, and slang. Presumably dictionary size is less of an issue now that they’re not printed on paper. If the Merriam-Webster word set must be used for prestige or reliability guarantees, use it but fall back to a larger dictionary when a query has no matches.
When the user queries words or phrases not in any dictionary, use an LLM to try to explain it. A prompt specifying the book, release date, and the plot so far can produce a much more informative explanation than a dictionary.

Avoid hawking and touting:

Diplomacy

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 12:00:00 +0000

My favourite introduction to Diplomacy is the This American Life episode where they send an elite American diplomat to help out an amateur at the National Championships. The most important takeaway is that the rules are very simple, such that performance is a fairly pure measure of the ability to negotiate and plan.

Diplomacy is one of the preferred games for cutting edge RL research, alongside the co-operative card game Hanabi, poker, and a slew of video games including Pokemon and Among Us. I enjoy its vaguely threatening aura - players fight for control of Europe, and the threat of backstabbing is ever-present.

Library

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 12:00:00 +0000

“I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. This is not a new insight, but the truth of it is something you have to experience to fully grasp.”

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryū Suzuki
The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works, Shinzen Young
Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas, Leigh Brasington
In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon, Bhikkhu Bodhi
Eastern Body, Western Mind, Anodea Judith
Fidelity: How to Create a Loving Relationship That Lasts, Thich Nhat Hanh
Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation, Bruce Tift
Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising, Rob Burbea
Be Here Now, Ram Dass
The Elephant in the Brain, Robin Hanson
Pyschoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process, Nancy McWilliams
Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection, Robert A. Johnson
The Dance of Anger, Harriet Lerner
- In addition to being practical and insightful, The Dance of Anger makes an appearance in her son’s autofictional The Topeka School.
Impro, Keith Johnstone

Biographies and auto-biographies

The Singapore Story and From Third World to First, by Lee Kuan Yew
- The “Zero to One” of building a first world nation.
Personal History by Katharine Graham (1917-2001), former leader of the Washington Post.
Steve Jobs and Einstein, both by Walter Isaacson
Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
Just Kids, by Patti Smith
Inside the Aquarium, by Viktor Suvorov (Vladimir Rezun)
- A tank company commander, then a GRU intelligence officer. 1970s.
Korzybski, by Bruce Kodish. From 1879.
A Higher Loyalty, by James Comey
Hillybilly Elegy, by JD Vance
Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume VI. 1955-1966.

Non-fiction

Man’s Search for Meaning
Hiroshima
Legal Systems Very Different From Ours
How to Change Your Mind
Factfulness
The Hatred of Poetry
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America

Business and popular science

The Hard Thing about Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz
Zero to One, by Peter Thiel
The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil
The Quantum Frontier, by Don Lincoln
Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari (although in my opinion this essay by Erik Hoel is better)
Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn
Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology
The Checklist Manifesto
Poor Economics, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo
Essays by Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon (translated by Jonathan Bennett)

Autofiction

Trip, Taipei, and Leave Society, all by Tao Lin
My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgård
Early Work, Andrew Martin
Real Life, Brandon Taylor
10:04, The Topeka School, and other works by Ben Lerner
Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion

Fiction

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
Infinite Jest, DFW
East of Eden, Steinbeck
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
Rosa Alchemica, William Butler Yeats
The Nameless City, H.P. Lovecraft
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
The Culture novels by Ian Banks
The Machine Stops, E. M. Forster
The Gentle Seduction, Marc Stiegler
- Inspired The Gentle Romance
Remembrance of Earth’s Past by Liu Cixin (i.e. The Three Body Problem)
Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
The Nexus Trilogy by Ramez Naam
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls, both by Lois McMaster Bujold

“I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again.”

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