#038: What Paul Graham Teaches His Kids, Best Resources for Learning CUDA, Communicating Your Vision Clearly

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

This week, we will explore some of the insights investor Paul Graham teaches his children, a site as addicting as it is silly, how to communicate your vision effectively, and more. Let's dive in:

Paul Graham's Lessons For His Children

​Paul Graham is the co-founder of Y Combinator and an early investor in companies such as Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Coinbase, Doordash, Reddit, and more. He famously writes essays covering all aspects of business and life, which are widely circulated within the tech community and aimed at a mature audience.

Paul happens to have a very active Twitter/X account, where he also regularly shares the life lessons he teaches his young children (starting from age four up to the current teenage years).

We are currently compiling every single lesson he has shared, and curating it on a new Instagram page. Here, you will be able to see original images and designs created with tools such as Photoshop and Midjourney, along with screenshots of the original advice. We have ambitious goals with this project and would love for you to follow along as we continue to add more pieces to the account.

A Million Checkboxes

"This is the most pointless website on the planet. It's fantastic." Is what the Washington Post has written about One Million Checkboxes.

The premise of the site is simple. There are one million checkboxes on the website, and checking a box checks (and unchecks) it for everyone. That's it.

​Nolen Royalty and Neal Agarwal spent two days coding this website and hoped 'a few hundred people would try it'. The original tweet announcing the site went viral, and it now has nearly half a million players.

It's ridiculous, addicting, semi-pointless, and most importantly...fun. It's an example of what the internet could be, and a reminder that not everything related to computers has to be serious all the time.

Best Resources for Learning CUDA

​CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is one of the most important recent technological breakthroughs in the computing space. It is developed by NVIDIA, and allows us to handle the massive parallel processing power of their GPUs in order to help us accelerate computationally intensive tasks. What a mouthful.
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If you're unsure why it's a big deal, here's a video of the Mythbusters attempting to paint the Mona Lisa with a GPU versus a CPU. Needless to say, this is a very important item to learn for the future.

Twitter/X user @mrsiipa asked:

The top resources mentioned in the replies were as follows: Cuda Cohort for Cohere for AI, CUDA Fundamental Optimization on YouTube, CUDA Fundamental Optimization Part 2, Programming Massively Parallel Processors, NVIDIA CUDA Docs, Fabian Sanglard's Website, and the ENCCS Guide to GPU Programming.

The Best (and free) After Effects Alternative

Twitter/X user @pikilipita strikes a huge win against Ad*be by creating an incredibly stunning alternative to After Effects - pikimov.com.

The site is an online motion design and video editor that is 100% free, no sign-up required, web-based, completely local files (no AI training), and almost too good to be true. We can't wait to try it out for our video production needs.

Thank you, Pikilipta!

Communicating Your Vision Effectively

How do you communicate your vision effectively? This could be in your personal or professional life - with yourself, or with others. Twitter/X user @kpaxs breaks down the primary idea from the book, How to Manage by Jo Owen, in these profoundly simple but accurate steps:

In the words of Steve Jobs, "The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come...", so make your story and vision the best it can be!

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Always wishing you the best,

J.B.