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the moralists ask us how we can justify our love of reading, we can make use of some such excuse as this. But if we are honest, we know that no such e
The hot new theory online is that reading is kaput, and therefore civilization is too. The rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies has shattered
TED’S 24 RULES FOR READINGReading shouldn’t be a goal—instead it ought to be cultivated as a habit.It should be a relaxing and enjoyable habit, someth
“You can search and search all your life, but sometimes you need to realise you’ve arrived.”
“So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.”
Christians believe purgatory exists because of God’s divine mercy, but even here on earth, perhaps the waiting period is more merciful than we realize
to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
“we maxed out intelligence but minimized wisdom”
Knowledge of the world isn’t the same as experiencing the world. Why does online connection so often seem to lack aliveness , as compared to encount
it's weird that at a given age, 45 say, someone can't just write down the compressed/compiled topline notes on everything they've learned about life,
It also aligned the computer with something that is often inspiring to many people and artists: nature. If I can find the sublime in microchips and SD
Sometimes, You Have To Say No To Your Friends To Say Yes To Your Work When asked, Lin-Manuel Miranda says Wait For It is the best song he’s ever writ
when making things becomes frictionless, starting stops meaning anything.
i've noticed a weird aversion to using AI on the left. not sure if it's a climate or an IP thing or what, but it seems like a massive self-own to dedu
If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you're illiberal. If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you're a
If you believe Charlie Kirk deserved to die because he was “homophobic” and “transphobic”, are you going to be morally consistent, and also celebrate
A lot of people believe they’re “principled” when they’re actually just rigid. And the rigidity is making them boring as fuck.And I don’t mean boring
A trend is a fad whose demand is not satisfied. A fad is a trend whose demand is satisfied too quickly. The lesson? If you experience success, do not
This is silly simplified but people who work in “Brand” are typically valued for their taste and ability to forecast and predict trends. They see the
One of the surprising and counter-cultural truths about modern-day marketing, which I suspect drives many efficiency-minded people practically insane,
Death is a mirror in which the entire meaning of life is reflected Sogyal Rinpoje
As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die. (Federico García Lorca)
When I interviewed Andrea Gibson last year, they shared a line that they loved from a poem by Saul Williams: “only believers in death will die.” When
The promise of artificial superintelligence is based on the idea that objective intelligence is the only intelligence. Or, even if there are multiple
the apparently hard problems (chess, calculus) turned out to be computationally easy, while the apparently easy ones (recognizing a face, walking acro
“smart” people are stupid in more complicated ways
We built systems that prize speed above all else, and in doing so we lost the most fundamental lesson that nature teaches: speed of growth makes you f
All human wisdom is contained in these two words: ‘wait’ and ‘hope’!”
don’t live each day like it’s your last. live like you’ll make it to 100. think in centuries.
Rebecca Solnit (from “Hope in the Dark”): “Inside the word emergency is emerge; from an emergency, new things come forth. The old certainties are cru
C. S. Lewis (from “The Weight of Glory”): “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizatio
Henrik Karlsson (from “The Third Chair”): “The stale, dry air reactivated feelings I had forgotten, feelings I had when I sat down here writing four
Nancy Zuo (from “the case for virtual reality”): “i'm still hopeful in vr. i really am. the magic is still there. it is alive. it’s just in the arts,
There’s a phrase making the rounds online: “The more I heal, the less ambitious I become.” I’ve been wondering if its resonance reveals a quiet fatigu
I am not less capable because I refuse to live in constant activation. I’m just less exploitable.
My body was not an obstacle to ambition, but the barometer for what sustainable ambition could look like now.
Useful and Overlooked Skills
Design talk: Too much consistency will ruin your app. Humans are naturally drawn to experiences that create a strong sense of place. This demands va
People who don't pause exist more in their head than their body. The mind is top-down, rigid, quick, enforcing an established view. The mind is waitin
We all know we’re overstimulated and want to stop, but we can’t. We use app blockers, throw our phones away, and build rigid routines. But none of it
humans don’t have fixed identities. we’re constantly testing. trying different versions of ourselves. seeing what gets rewarded. adjusting based on fe
I feel like there’s something so soulless about our culture—something deeply, deeply missing in people’s experience of life, a kind of superficiality.
At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get b
You’re doomscrolling because you’re looking for something to transform you but you can’t stay with one thing for long enough to be transformed by it.
A book is, we know, an unrivaled technology for living more life. The contemporary internet-abetted image, on the other hand, is a highly potent yet f
A great story about simplicity from Akio Morita, the instigator of the Walkman project at Sony: Engineers had the technology to add the recording func
Smaller and simpler software with one core feature always makes me more focused. Every time I want to write something I open a simple text editor inst
This is pretty good, and strangely consistent with my own idea of good taste Tasteful people pursue stuff with purpose, have an appreciation and curi
On paper, taste = discernment. In practice, taste = your sense of self, made visible.
For Kant, judgment is the mental faculty that connects particulars to universals—the capacity to say “this thing is an instance of that category.” But
A system optimized for noise elimination is hostile to the genuinely new. It converges on what works, on what has worked. That convergence might produ
So much value and love for the process of writing and what it does for the coherence between heart, brain, imagination, lived reality, unseen, and see
You can’t write a viral essay that says “it’s complicated and I’m not sure.” But this is the only path to truly novel insight.
Writing is a task that takes both objective and subjective intelligence. LLMs ace the objective parts the same way they ace every test; you can’t faul
design is the embodiment of values. Design is the ultimate commitment to or compromise of one’s values. And this is how we go about the world. We make
When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, “I submitted to the typeface of least resistance.” Ti
“The trouble with market research is people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.” (David Ogilv
If you have something worth spreading, it’s considerate to spread it widely, to reach people through their favorite medium.
This brings me to my core thesis: The inconvenience and inferior data transfer speeds of conversational interfaces make them an unlikely replacement f
personality is the moat gemini is technically great but feels like talking to a corporate helpdesk that’s read too many hr manuals. no edge, no warmth
Can we replicate https://github.com/olton/metroui Metro UI with AI
Rob and I had to face the truth: Matter is a great product—3x App of the Day, with many thousands of passionate users—but it isn’t the next Duolingo.
When the institutions are optimized to fund the legible thing and the individuals are optimized to build the legible thing, the identity of the founde
www.simonstalenhag.se
The text actually moves back and forth between all of these. Few novels pay less attention to the rules of fiction than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
surprise may be a better proxy for creativity than quality. A polished output is not necessarily creative, but a surprising one might be. Yet even sur
When evaluating a company, one of my favorite questions to ask is whether it has an aesthetic. We don’t talk about aesthetics as the highest form of
13 Creative Commandments: 1. Talent is an important differentiator, but talent needs to put in the hours to excel. 2. Question everything. Question wh
“In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”
My old definition was "freedom to." Freedom to do anything I want. Freedom to do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like. Now, the freedom I'm look
“To be free of all authority, of your own and that of another, is to die to everything of yesterday, so that your mind is always fresh, always young,
A conversation between Alex Dobrenko and Douglas Rushkoff on the spiritual nature of awe, rescuing the human from the machine, and why the future depe
We've fallen for the trap of thinking something doesn't exist if it isn't on the Internet. Maria Popova: "The internet is a surface level of the oce
A person spends years trying to become beautiful online. They finally achieve the exact face, body, lifestyle, and aesthetic they once fantasized abou
"Every product in the world, the quality at the end of the day is simply a reflection of how much the people who created it gave a shit about the prod
I asked Kelly about the tradeoffs of focusing on a single thing if you want to be great (which is what I had been getting at before). “Greatness is ov
“The techniques that we use, they’re not a big secret. It’s just about making an effort and repeating the same thing every day.” Jiro repeats the s
A great story about simplicity from Akio Morita, the instigator of the Walkman project at Sony: Engineers had the technology to add the recording func
Long-tail users of user-centered design are not given the degree of control necessary to adapt the design object or tool to their unique needs, and de
The engineer who truly understands the problem often finds that the elegant solution is simpler than anyone expected. The engineer who starts with a
If prestige thinking is less essential than we claimed, and if machines can now produce a lot of its outputs cheaply, then what’s coming is not necess
In ‘How Movies Were Edited 60 Years Ago,’ an editor manually cut film splicing, taping, and rewinding at a near biblical pace. Each move carried signi
Why should what you produce, rather than what you consume, be the most important thing about you? Why shouldn’t the fact that you race boats or watch
consumption choices force you to develop the habit of self-examination. And when you think about more complex life choices — what kind of personality
“What allows genius to flower is not neurosis but its opposite... ordinary Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all the ability to survive
Hard work never killed a man. Men die of boredom, psychological conflict, and disease. They do not die of hard work. -David Ogilvy
“Don't be so humble - you are not that great.” ― Golda Meir
Most AI backlash is economic anxiety coated in a veneer of social justice. Alfalfa farming consumes 19 times the water that data centers do; there’s n
“Diffusion lag” reflects a lack of product-market fit. Even AI optimists are still hitting practical roadblocks. That’s why detailed case studies are
Here are some things I’ve asked chatgpt recently: “why is Toblerone so popular at airport duty-free stores?” “give me a recipe for a chickpea tagine
The paradigm of acceleration fails to grasp the deeper human tension between action and contemplation. It’s a false binary, one that Benedict XVI (the
I didn’t feel comfortable inside the endlessness of it. I am the kind of writer who believes in taking the time I need to come up with something worth
“Life is always winking at us, calling our attention to the beauty hidden in plain sight. Why do we so often miss what’s right in front of us, lost in
The writer Ted Chiang was once asked in an interview if he ever considered publishing more frequently. Chiang, one of the greatest living fiction writ
how many people you touched > how many people you reached
To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy th
Mastery is the best goal because the rich can't buy it, the impatient can't rush it, the privileged can't inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can
Collecting and archiving are ways to reclaim and own our attention—they are acts of meaning-making. These practices are rituals: habits and skills tha
Parnell shows that authors of color and queer authors are much more likely to have their work flagged as “adult content,” largely due to problems with
The whole thing about the Kardashians — the resistance they’ve kind of induced in people — is that it doesn’t feel consensual. You absorb information
What gets clicks becomes what gets made. The edges get sanded down. Originality gives way to imitation. Junk food wins, so everyone starts cooking cra
It takes yesterday’s trends, remixes them with today’s keywords, and spits out tomorrow’s mediocrity. It’s not thinking. It’s rehashing. Recursively,
We must choose the “longest way round” because meaning is neither fast nor viral nor optimized.It’s made. Slowly. Painfully. Honestly.By humans.
But what felt new was the speed and violence with which language now manifests markets. I’d sit in meetings as a single phrase “AI-native vertical Saa
The five principles of prompting I developed work equally well as management techniques for humans: Give direction. Describe the desired style in de
People who are good at solving poorly defined problems don't get the same kind of kudos. They don’t get any special titles or clubs. There is no test
2) Clear Roles & Decision Rights Without clear swim lanes and decision rights, individuals on teams feel disempowered and projects tend to stall out.
Distractions divert you from your goals, while opportunities align with and propel you toward them. For example, Americans spend an average of 11 hour
re: many genAI apps can do 'anything and everything' i used to tell this funny story to a lot of consumer founders: when one-shot TTS first started
A lot of companies don’t make it because in the process of trying to get many things right, they don’t get anything right.Why are they in such a hurry
What is this teaching me?
Latvia’s Flow won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and was created because he was somehow obsessed Blender, the free/open-source 3D modeling tool.
Scott Alexander’s recent post argues that the best response to AI displacement isn’t optimization or doomerism—it’s play. Figure out what you actually
what would one imperfect action teach me?
Contribute your skills to an existing effort – make it possible. Build the website, raise the funds, recruit the talent, plan the events. As Bill McKi
They're blind to a simple truth: complex minds can't develop on their own. If they could, feral children would be like any other. And minds don't grow
Our society’s individualism, largely driven by technological advances and the illusion of endless progress, will no longer be sustainable – will not b
Confessional art can be beautiful, and it can be terrible; either way, to love it only as a representation of what we already know is to deny it, and
Meanwhile, a fixation on honesty continues to pervade popular arts discourse, music included. Indie scenesters have historically been the ones to agit
When scientific progress destabilized religious authority and the lack of meaning found in a pure rational worldview revealed science’s limitations, m
"Every product in the world, the quality at the end of the day is simply a reflection of how much the people who created it gave a shit about the prod
we have a world where friction gets automated out of experiences, aestheticized in curated lifestyles, and dumped onto underfunded infrastructure and
Long-tail users of user-centered design are not given the degree of control necessary to adapt the design object or tool to their unique needs, and de
" We teachers - perhaps all human beings - are in the grip of an astonishing delusion. We think that we can take a picture, a structure, a working mod
thinking about when my dad was teaching me to drive and had me do my route to school (12 miles away) three times: once at the speed limit, once at the
Strategies for Learning
If you find yourself in a culture of Tension, the best way to move that culture forward is to create a sense of clarity and opportunity. Show people w
in times of intense stress or adversity, future-oriented thinking such as hope may be more effective than mindfulness in sustaining positive mindsets
So many people say "I don't want to have kids because I don't want them to experience all the issues in the world today". What are they smoking? We l
The main problem with Burning Man — and with the current psychedelic renaissance — is the lack of a meaningful systems-level critique. Such a critique
Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third-story window. Psychedelics are illegal because
When you say that the status quo draws people toward more individuated, personality-driven work, what do you think is causing that, both culturally an
to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
iUnlock doors with it.iMeet lovers through it.iOrder food with it.iSummon cars with it.iEven meditate with it.Apple designed the iPhone too well.So we
The question is not whether algorithms can ever foster greatness—they cannot. Their design is fundamentally at odds with the qualities that define gre
The algorithms that shape our cultural landscape are not inherently malicious. They are indifferent. Their purpose is not to destroy art but to optimi
The Shawshank Redemption failed at the box office but went on to gross more than $100 million as a cult classic. The 48 Laws of Power missed the bes
We should be skeptical of both utopian and dystopian technology predictions. New tools will amplify both our virtues and our vices, just like every pr
We see something that works, and then we understand it “We see something that works, and then we understand it.” (Thomas Dullien) It is a deeper
So when people opt to devote their energy to tracking the latest TikTok star or scrolling content instead of nurturing interpersonal relationships, th
Social media stopped being primarily about connecting socially a long time ago. People still use a range of technologies to connect to friends and bui
Taste for Privacy: How Context, Identity, and Lived-Experience Shape Information Sharing Preferences
The social-platform layer offers the feeling of encounter with the friction surgically removed. As one analysis of Gen Z’s parasocial turn put it, onl
For decades, technology has required standardized solutions to complex human problems. In order to scale software, you had to build for the average us
1. Embracing ‘Anti-Scale’According to John their maximum audience is capped at 200,000.“If we have 10 million subscribers we've pivoted. Something's g
Communities are not resources to be optimised and they're not user bases to be migrated. They're the accumulated residue of people choosing, over and
The freedom of information the internet brings helps us expose idiot intellectuals quickly and more accurately than ever before. But the internet also
“As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other peopl
I am tired of seeing speed as a selling point. I’ve wanted to talk about this for a long time. I think one of the main reasons many of us feel anxio
From Lily Chambers: I genuinely do not care if AI tools make me more productive. I am tired of seeing, "increased productivity" as a selling point. I
Some ppl really ruin their lives trying to experience third person feelings in the first person.” Feelings observed are distinct from feelings felt. W
The quality that you’re looking for in most meditation is, I think, best described as collectedness. You can think of this as the opposite of being sc
Moreover, adopting this curious, receptive attitude throughout your life is what will make your practice actually meaningful. Sitting for long periods
In recent years, neuroimaging has provided evidence to suggest that imagining the future relies on much of the same neural machinery as remembering th
There is indirect evidence to support this idea. For instance, individuals tend to act in a way that is consistent with or constrained by how they hav
Particularly relevant to the idea of episodic simulation is the process of forming “implementation intentions” (Gollwitzer, 1999) which involve imagin
The distinctive feature of imagination, therefore, rests on its capacity of creating new mental images by combining and modifying stored perceptual in
Why So Many of the World’s Oldest Companies Are in Japan
The short-term crowd is always too distracted to notice the long-term crowd slowly compounding. An investor obsessing over daily economic data misses
All you have to do is just be 5% better than everyone else who’s really bad at it. You don’t have to get everything perfect… you just have to be a lit
Start in the future and work backward
If you pay attention, you’ll see that today’s winning brands understand the customer’s story is the only one that matters. Your most important job as
Solving a problem for your user is great, but easing their cognitive dissonance can have a much greater emotional impact. There is likely something th
The Questions Before the Questions
And I hear all sorts of interesting worries and anxieties from people. Lots of people say something like, “Oh, I would like to be more playful and pas
anxiety surrounding AI art is less about computers becoming humans and more about humans becoming more robotic. social media is robotic, formulaic. ev
THEN Almitra spoke again and said, And what of Marriage, master? And he answered saying: You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore
And yet, as is often the case, those of us who need love so badly at a particular moment can be off-putting to those who want to love us, and to those
Two loves hold reality and make our universe unique to the rest: tetrahedron → “hollywood love” hypertetrahedron/pentachoron/5-cell → “real love“ —88
The hyperreal doesn’t mimic or imitate reality. It replaces reality altogether, making it nearly impossible for us to determine what is real, what isn
I say please and thank you, not because I believe it matters to him, but because it matters to me. If I am going to use natural English to communicate
Every phase of life can be shopped for at Costco. Where else can you purchase a wedding ring, a baby carrier, and a casket? It follows your own life s
when i'm tied up in consumption, creation is lost to me; i am no longer the writer, the creative, the poet, the artist, but the eater, the viewer, the
“So thinking is prior to language. What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them. This h
“His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the over
across many dimensions we have been acculturated to value the aggregated over the individual, and defaulting to the average consensus has become comfo
one of the reasons school fails to help people model success is that a series of tests introduces no randomness. Success in real life involves a grea
ideas only become clear once you begin to work on them
The friction between idea and ability that AI evangelists promise to eradicate is not a problem suffered by a disadvantaged few. It’s the fundamental
the choice humanity faces in every age is between the idea of power and the power of ideas
“I would make sushi in my dreams. I would jump out of bed at night with ideas.” Leonardo Da Vinci, Michael Ferrero, and Colin Chapman all did the s
“Bring together things that have not yet been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.” ― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer
In 1985, Nike held a 24-hour shoe design contest. Nike was struggling. Their stock dropped 50%. They had to lay off people. Adidas, Converse, and Reeb
I think that talking about agency and introspection separately is misguided. People who emphasize how to get things done, and move faster, and reach h
When I try to make the best thing, it feels different. It feels like I’m trying to prove something to someone instead of trying to discover something
