Agalia Tan

Pulling from a curated set of my own and others’ ideas has so much more aliveness to it than the default LLM experience where you often drag your eyes across the words and feel...nothing.

Here, there’s a feeling that these words matter, the jolt from reading a very good sentence, a just-in-time encounter with something true and weird and original... See more

I watched a good TikTok recently (!! my first ever TikTok citation) where the speaker describes life as a game of hot and cold. You move through the world and certain ideas resonate in your body, touch some invisible place within. The warmth is your internal guidance system telling you that you’re getting closer to yourself:

You don’t discover who... See more

The tech industry today is at a shocking loss for any kind of coherent narrative concerning what it is we’re doing. Intelligence, yes, but why? How will it improve our lives? The metrics have eaten the mission. Did people look? If yes, you’re winning. If not, try again. Few ask: winning at what?

The reason people want the file, and the reason the taste discourse feels so hollow, is that most people don’t have beliefs to fall back on.

The tyranny of LLMs is that you could ask for options forever and never finish. You are left disoriented, with a single question: what will you put your name on?

But words are a lossy medium for describing rich, multidimensional ideas. To use a word is to borrow its relevance, but also to inherit its baggage.