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January 21 - February 7, 2025
What we now think of as “the Internet” is actually a collection of many protocols, but the chief among them (so much so that it’s often referred to more or less synonymously with the Internet) is what’s known as Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP. It was born from a 1973 talk and a 1974 paper by Vinton “Vint” Cerf and Robert “Bob” Kahn, who laid out a proposal for the language of—as they imagined calling it—an “internetwork.”
As linguist Victor Yngve would write in 1970, “In fact, both the person who has the turn and his partner are simultaneously engaged in both speaking and listening.
this is an interesting quote for the couple curiosity prompts
In 2014, for instance, UC Santa Cruz’s Jackson Tolins and Jean Fox Tree demonstrated that those inconspicuous “uh-huhs” and “yeahs” and “hmms” and “ohs” that pepper our speech perform distinct, precise roles in regulating the flow of information from speaker to listener—both its rate and level of detail.
in curiosity prompts, the generosity is in showing you are ready to take in all the information they are outputting, no backstabber communication required.
One of the fundamental principles of buffers, be they for packets or patrons, is that they only work correctly when they are routinely zeroed out.
buffer = queue in the Grand scheme of non computer uses
We use the idiom of “dropped balls” almost exclusively in a derogatory sense, implying that the person in question was lazy, complacent, or forgetful. But the tactical dropping of balls is a critical part of getting things done under overload.
when overloaded, it is time to tactically drop the ball
if the rules of the game force a bad strategy, maybe we shouldn’t try to change strategies. Maybe we should try to change the game.
what rules will give us the behaviour we want to see? reverse game theory
“Morality is herd instinct in the individual,” wrote Nietzsche.
emotions are evolutionary game mechanics design
An enormously influential paper by the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch has demonstrated that under the right circumstances, a group of agents who are all behaving perfectly rationally and perfectly appropriately can nonetheless fall prey to what is effectively infinite misinformation. This has come to be known as an “information cascade.”
competition with incomplete information, using other people's actions as data points
The takeaways are several. For one, be wary of cases where public information seems to exceed private information, where you know more about what people are doing than why they’re doing it,
When you’re mostly looking to others to set a course, they may well be looking right back at you to do the same.
In a landmark finding called the “revelation principle,” Nobel laureate Roger Myerson proved that any game that requires strategically masking the truth can be transformed into a game that requires nothing but simple honesty.
must learn more about this principle
The road to hell is paved with intractable recursions, bad equilibria, and information cascades. Seek out games where honesty is the dominant strategy. Then just be yourself.
Even the best strategy sometimes yields bad results—which is why computer scientists take care to distinguish between “process” and “outcome.” If you followed the best possible process, then you’ve done all you can, and you shouldn’t blame yourself if things didn’t go your way.
processes are what we have control over. outcomes, we might influence but don't control
We can be “computationally kind” to others by framing issues in terms that make the underlying computational problem easier. This matters because many problems—especially social ones, as we’ve seen—are intrinsically and inextricably hard.
by simplifying interpersonal computations (choices) we are giving a gift to the people we are working with
