Agalia Tan

Kurt Vonnegut, talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope:

“Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of

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So practice the lost art of losing.

Which three things would you save if your house were on fire? It is important to grasp what is essential to us. And to recognize that losing is our natural predicament. We are always losing. Rock bottom can be a tabula rasa from which to create something beautiful (that might not last).

the Taste Guy is just the Idea Guy reinvented for the attention age. It’s trading meaning-making for trend-hopping and cosplaying success instead of earning it.

A digital garden is a framework for speculation around how online space can be designed from the imagination of gardens. Here, the values of gardens, pluralism, interdependence, sustainability, adaptation, and discovery are centered in the design process of technosocial spaces. A garden is made up of the following parts:

Seeds: the content... See more

In AI, we have something genuinely new - a category of technology that doesn’t fit our existing frames - and we’re trying to describe it with words inherited from the past. Every term we reach for either undersells the thing or oversells it.

“Assistant” makes it sound like a slightly upgraded Clippy. “Tool” makes it sound like a hammer.... See more

A great relationship is not only finding the person you have fun with, but also finding the person you want to be bored with. The beauty of long-term relationships is often hidden in boring, ordinary moments.