Agalia Tan

There are infinite quotidian human experiences ripe for interpreting: putting off housework, caring about who I sit next to at a dinner party, struggling to get dressed. They stack up every day. I’m particularly fond of using them to draw ungenerous conclusions: I’m shallow, selfish, lazy, dishonest. I’ve trained myself away from defending my goodn... See more

Something that’s been on my mind is flipping the relationship between the human and language model when going through a creative process. It seems that we often want to ask questions of language models, and we expect them to brainstorm ideas or give us answers, but I wonder if another fruitful pattern here is having models ask questions of us .

Their gospel of optimisation ignores the fundamental question: what’s the point of being 10x more productive if we’re not 10x more fulfilled?

“Everyone bifurcates the world into content and distribution,” Whaley told me. He has brown hair, is of average height, and was wearing a nondescript gray t-shirt and jeans when we talked. “From the beginning, we viewed those as the same thing. Each object gets better with more participation, and so does MSCHF. Scale is not the goal. Scale is a too... See more

We are deeply into sex, but at the same time, deeply at odds with it, often misunderstanding our own urges, needs, and desires. We judge our sexual longings, we curtail our desires, and we cut ourselves off from all that it affords us. We convince ourselves that we just don’t need it or want it. This is a problem that speaks to an unhappiness at ou

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We need to treat alignment not as a prerequisite, but as a process. “Getting it” isn’t a static quality—it’s a product of access, timing, exposure, and experience.

One method is to design for shared sensemaking. That might mean narrating your mental model instead of assuming it’s obvious. It might mean making space for dissent even when time feels t... See more