Recently I’ve been trying to improve both how I absorb information and when to do so.

This has honestly been on my mind for a while, ever since I was lurking on tpot, before ever posting. I used to read yacine’s blog quite often (before the purge), and ofc gwern , and a variety of substacks. However I didn’t act on the thought up until about a month(?) ago, when I reread all the posts on Ludwig’s bearblog. I ended up sitting there for an hour or two just rereading every post over and over and trying to extract as much wisdom as I could from them, how I could apply this to my work and life in general.


This led me to spend a few days going over articles I respected and trying to figure out some kind of mental model to process them and benefit from the reading. It’s quite hard to put into words but the best I could describe it as is kind of like a dynamically generated structured output based on what the topic was, how it related to my work etc etc, this seemed to work pretty well, as now I can usually read over an article and see the lesson/point in it and apply that to myself or note it down for when needed.


This might seem like a stupid thing to consider, but for me it felt kind of necessary to look back on something I considered so natural and just approach it from different angles to see what works best. It’s incredibly easy to think you’re really benefiting from all this reading but could you really quantify how much you actually took away from that reading? I think complacency is the root of all downfalls, even in something as mundane as this, and I can definitely attest to benefiting from this review.


The lesson from this post? That’s for you to parse!