sparks

Like me, she was very good in a crisis and very bad on a typical weekday; I believe it was she who introduced me to Walker Percy, even taking me to Covington to see where he lived, and he was well-aware of this reality: “It is easier to survive a category five hurricane than it is to get through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon.” My mother was... See more

Mills Baker • Mother

never trust a thought you have indoors

The biggest bottleneck in building superintelligence is that AI agents are not as of yet very good at evaluating how they’re doing at a given goal. If they could better self-assess, they could self-improve. And digital self-improvement loops could lead to superintelligence. Making progress on importing particular human taste/judgement into LLMs

Many people who lack action are naive and like to sit and wait for things to happen naturally. They naively think that others will care about their affairs. In actual fact, other than yourself, others will not be very interested in them. People are only interested in their own things.

M. Tan • The 38 Letters From J.D. Rockefeller to His Son

I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.

-Tolkien

Three things:

Everything, if done long enough and deeply enough, is sometimes tedious.

I’m pretty sure the key to long-term happiness lies in having fun even when something is tedious and difficult.

If you find something fun even when it’s objectively hard, keep going.

Ava • Everything’s Okay if You’re Still Having Fun

From Jeff Bezos’ conversation with Lex Fridman:

If you think about the good old days, they're mostly an illusion. Like, in almost every way, life is better for almost everyone today than it was, say, 50 years ago or 100 years ago. We live better lives, by and large, than our grandparents did and their grandparents did, and so on. And you can see

I hope the sense of struggling, rather than knowing, is palpable here.

Rayne Fisher-Quann • the ends of empathy

love the honesty here - it’s not write what you know, it’s write to understand what you don’t know

“What is talkativeness? It is the result of doing away with the vital distinction between talking and keeping silent. Only some one who knows how to remain essentially silent can really talk--and act essentially. Silence is the essence of inwardness, of the inner life. Mere gossip anticipates real talk, and to express what is still in thought