Alex Dobrenko

Eyes don’t know what they are looking at. Cameras don’t know what they are looking at. To make sense of visual input, the brain (or neural network) organises these signals into categories. Chairs are ‘furniture,’ an apple is ‘fruit.’

We rely on the existence of an “away,” where all this heat, waste, everything, goes to and stays in. But it never disappears – it comes back.

1. The Swedish House Mafia Technique Get a room with friends away from the outside world. Throw ideas back and forth like a tennis rally. Here's Swedish House Mafia creating the iconic "One".

An online space that actually feels good

What does seem certain is that in his adolescence, Andrew became a regular consumer of talk therapy. In therapy, one learns to tell stories about one’s experience. A story one could tell is: I overcame immense odds to be where I am. Another is: The son of a Stanford professor, born at Stanford Hospital, grows up to be a Stanford professor.

Sixteen years later, in 2020, Robin Sloan published a blog post called “An App Can Be a Home-Cooked Meal” which picked up on many of the same themes.

He talked about building a tiny app for his family to send short videos to one another. Only his family have access. He’s not going to turn it into a start-up. It doesn’t have any commercial or market... See more

why it's hard to make friends as an adult:

where there's shared context (seeing the same people over many months daily i.e. workplaces) there's a lack of shared interests

where there's shared interest (hobby groups, bookclubs, etc) there's a lack of shared context

START, EVERY TIME, WITH THIS INVIOLABLE RULE: THE SCENE MUST BE DRAMATIC. it must start because the hero HAS A PROBLEM, AND IT MUST CULMINATE WITH THE HERO FINDING HIM OR HERSELF EITHER THWARTED OR EDUCATED THAT ANOTHER WAY EXISTS