Alex Dobrenko

“Sublime should be something people use, not something people consume.”

ou weren’t here when we had to stay up past midnight to even see a band we loved on MTV. You’re here now, wherever’s here to you. When you ask someone my age if they were into Nirvana, they claim of course they were, loved Nirvana. Same way they were all against the war in Iraq. You don’t understand that we never heard these bands when someone else... See more

If an idea would have a life-cycle i would say: first it manifests as rather abstract feeling, Guided by that feeling you go on search for a form that the feeling can be born into. Once you find a matching shape–the magic happens.

One of the reasons I love games like this is that, unlike Chess, this is a wicked problem . What’s the best way for an agent to extract information from a noisy environment? We make sense of the world through stories of cause and effect, but, on close examination these stories are far less simple than they appear. In The Book of Why, computer... See more

Tl;dr: I think personal knowledge management, in many cases, is a fruitless effort and there are generally only very few cases (see above) in which note taking actually makes sense.

A Signalling Theory of PKMThe reason Knowledge Graphs and other PKM memes are so trendy is that, by publicizing one’s overwrought Knowledge Management System, people think they are showing off their big brains. Perhaps for some people, it sincerely feels like intellectual progress to externalize one’s overgrown web of ideas and one’s arcane system... See more

Then it occurred to me: I could write a special essay every month and simply mail it to dues-paying members as a letter. It just clicked: We’re readers, we’re writers, we’re a new breed of independent scholars bootstrapping a new republic of letters... I should just write you... letters, to bring everyone off the computer screen regularly, to share... See more