Debbie Foster

being an adult was all about not pointing out the obvious in situations where the obvious was too painful to take in.

Any lesson, even a necessary one, can be learned too well. There is a comfort in being disabused, a pride in turning up the lights and puncturing illusions that induces a different kind of blindness that needs to be challenged.

What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of “I’m not sure.”

… to build AI systems with social cognition, so that they can interact meaningfully with the user over the long term, we first need to solve two foundational problems in how memory systems work. These problems, called oneshot learning and continual learningare currently (as of early 2024) missing in publicly available LLMs.

To lexicographers, words are like abstract expressionist paintings, complicated and demanding of quiet contemplation and analysis. Their power lies in their existence, not their deployment. To others, though, words are armaments in an endless war, and the dictionary is the manufacturer.

Eroticism is one of the few forms of play permitted to adults. It occurs in a world parallel to the habitual one; it frees us to adopt new personas; it has a tendency to generate enduring communities whose members are "apart together" even when its excesses have come to an end; and, finally, it is dispensable and therefore indispensable.

Creating a useful, accurate picture of something complex and abstract is very difficult. And there is nothing more complex and abstract than the human mind.

One of the most pervasive myths about writing is that specificity is limiting. It's just the opposite. You might think that a poem about love or truth or freedom—a large abstraction—would reach more people if it were written with universality in mind. But if your goal is to speak to everyone, and to remove particulars from the piece because others

….as I studied the photos of my friend and read what others were saying about him, I felt I was observing a parallel self, the self I was not, the self I had failed to be. I spent those days with the sense of being twinned, taken out of my life. I often was not the one on the bus to work, but an external being, observing the counterfeit version of