Amy Zhen

So seriousness isn’t some kind of final reward, a golden watch you earn for a lifetime of operating in bad faith. It is, instead, one of those basic practices you gotta do to prevent your life from disintegrating, like getting out of bed and taking a shower and talking to people. That’s because seriousness is the great Orderer of Priorities, and... See more

Tech began to feel extractive, rather than additive: more and more people are in tech to make money, to climb the corporate ladder, to extract value, rather than adding it and growing the pie out of sheer curiosity of genuine love for the craft. Tech is attracting a different type of people than before, and everyone who's been in this industry long... See more

Her book The Sounds of Life , in many ways about AI -- how AI might help us communicate better with animals -- had just come out the previous fall, and was immediately wildly successful. She was on sabbatical at Harvard, gave a fantastic TED talk on the prospects of using AI to decipher animal communication, and was constantly doing podcasts and in... See more

Rising out the world, you and I,

a finite flame among the infinite darkness

of two nebulous chasms…

Born into a disenchanted world

of Cartesian rationalism, our minds

and spirits isolated from the universal,

a race of convulsionaries trudging

though the wastelands of a technocratic

nightmare, afraid of what we might become

if we rid ourselves of the... See more

The better life you absolutely can build isn’t going to be brought to you by ChatGPT but by your own steady uphill clawing and through careful management of your own expectations. You live here. This is it.

That’s to build the actual thing and make it actually available for anyone to try, use, and buy. Real usage on real things on real days during the course of real work is the only way to validate anything. And even then, it’s barely validation since there are so many other variables at play. Timing, marketing, pricing, messaging, etc.

Truth is, you... See more

One of my (many) contrarian beliefs is that we do not have strong enough preferences. We often blame social media or the speed of information as the reason why we’re easily distracted, but the real reason behind our inability to focus has less to do with the sheer quantity of media and more to do with our laziness when it comes to distinguishing... See more