Agalia Tan

When you prioritize what you yourself value, everything around you shifts, and asserting that value creates a kind of gravitational pull on the world so that things, systems, relationships get a chance to find new arrangements. What surprises me so far is that my “demands,” contrary to what I expected, haven’t been a burden to others but have... See more

Your life moves in the direction of your dominant thoughts

A delay builds up the perception of it

Look for the repeating patterns of desire in moments when you are truly happy. Look for the arrangements of energy that compel you. Remember, you are looking for general shapes, like “the feeling of sharing confidences,” or “the knowledge that you have served your duty.” Language here only serves as a pointer to the elemental arrangements of... See more

We learn to skim not just articles but conversations, relationships, even our own thoughts.

Voltaire once wrote that, “in order to have taste, it is not enough to see and to know what is beautiful in a given work. One must feel beauty and be moved by it.” No large language model has yet been programmed to feel anything, and no number of branded baseball caps is going to change that.

Now A.I. companies are attempting to hitch themselves to a similar aura of artisanality, even as their core products promise to automate all that is human into obsolescence. Last year, Anthropic hosted a pop-up café in Manhattan (what could be more hipster?) and gave away baseball caps embroidered with the word “thinking.” OpenAI’s recent Super... See more

“The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it,”