State the obvious!

Today I want to elaborate on the idea of stating the obvious. Please tell me you caught the metajoke The metajoke is that this a blog post where the idea is to elaborate on what the title is saying. By making the sentence “Today I want to elaborate on stating the obvious” is a redundant sentence. If all I wanted to say was state the obvious, there are certainly better avenues to make that joke. This post is inspired by Expecting Short Inferential Distances and may just be stating the “obvious” follow-ups, but perhaps there exist a few things that weren’t obvious to you that are obvious to me. I truly do not mean this in a condescending way at all. A canonical experience in everyone’s life is :

A: Ranting emotionally with no expectation of solution Doing X is so hard because you have to do Y first.

B: Stating the obvious Can’t you just do Z??

A: … … Why haven’t I thought of that?

Experiences like this could happen all the time. If the world was actually efficient. However, most people go on every day thinking that there is no alpha to be gained in stating the obvious.

Everyone’s mental model of the world is obvious to them. For example, take the moment you learned addition (assuming you have a high-school math understanding). Usually numbers are taught first, then counting then addition. If your model of addition was perfect, the way you think about addition didn’t change from 5th grade up until starting college. However, as you go through algebra, and calculus, you start filling things in that you didn’t even know about addition. First, you think it’s completely different. And then after a while, you realize that was just a small perturbation your notion of addition. As the model of the world becomes more robust, small differences in concepts stay as small differences.

Yesterday at work, I was reading through documentation for a very popular video watching platform called VLC Player. Most people have heard of VLC Player as the free version whenever they want to watch a video on their computer (as if anyone even does that anymore). Not many people know this, but there is actually a way to stream a video over a local-area-network and watch the video like that. VLC Player allows users to stream videos over a local-area-network, a feature not widely known1.

Neural Networks

Models should be just complex enough to accurately model the world, but not any more. To little complexity and y

Actor-Critic Reinforcement learning

Remote Work

Lossless Compression

Making the world more efficient

  1. This functionality is similar to how YouTube videos are streamed from Google’s servers distributed globally. If you want to know more about this stuff, I would recommend you start with Edge Computing. ↩