✨ Where great ideas come from

Paul Graham (@paulg) on how to do great work. I used to be stuck at the third point a lot and reading this helped me immensely. https://t.co/qaZt7VsVVY

At some point in their teenage years—and sometimes earlier—the future geniuses would apprentice themselves intellectually to someone with exceptional capacity in their field.

In a pre-AI world, you needed to define the rules of the game you were playing—to think from first principles and apply them to your circumstances. In a post-AI world, you need to build and use models that recognize underlying patterns—patterns that can’t be reduced to simple rules.

Consider building software. Pre-AI, you needed to define exactly... See more

Developing taste is an exercise in vulnerability: it requires you to trust your instincts and preferences, even when they don’t align with current trends or the tastes of your peers. Because while having taste is cool, taste itself reflects a certain type of uncool earnestness – a commitment to one’s own obsessions and quirks.

“Everything I do is just personal taste and it’s what [my book The Creative Act] is about. Really, for [people and artists] to trust in themselves. Make something that speaks to themselves. And hopefully someone else will like it. But you can’t second-guess your own taste for what someone else is going to like. It won’t be good. We’re not smart... See more

• LLMs are reading companions. When Patel is reading a book, he uses LLMs to understand concepts that he isn’t familiar with, like the nuances of White’s argument about how the stirrup created feudalism. “There's a bunch of stuff that's confusing...on these kinds of questions. The author is dead...but I can always continue the conversation with

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“Yego’s rise was enabled by YouTube. Yet since its founding, popular consensus has been that the video service is making people dumber. Indeed, modern video media may shorten attention spans and distract from longer-form means of communication, such as written articles or books. But critically overlooked is its unlocking a form of mass-scale tacit

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