A tradeoff occurs every time you get feedback. You become slightly more mainstream, slightly more aligned with the zeitgeist. You become marginally more of an exploiter than an explorer , standing on the shoulders of the giants who conceived the paradigm you’re striving to build upon. This is very effective when you want to align your work with oth... See more

I feel such intense gratitude when I read a book by someone who, for a brief moment, makes me feel less alone in the world and makes these complicated things in my brain feel a little easier to understand.

Three signs you’re scared of feeling joy:

1 You think you have to earn it

2 You focus on what could go wrong rather than right

3 You constantly feel like the other shoe is going to drop

It’s almost impossible to safely drive a car while only looking in the rear view mirror. Only seeing where you’ve been is a terrible way to figure out where to go.

But it’s really unsafe to go forward with no idea of what came before.

To me, challenging doesn’t look like the person who just grinds through a project to get it done, sacrificing sleep, family, or any semblance of balance. While brute force may be effective short -term, I’m convinced it doesn’t lend itself to sustainable creativity, joy, or meaning (and sustainability is everything – from a biological and mathematic... See more

This is, by the way, the dirty secret of the machine learning movement: almost everything produced by ML could have been produced, more cheaply, using a very dumb heuristic you coded up by hand, because mostly the ML is trained by feeding it examples of what humans did while following a very dumb heuristic. There's no magic here. If you use ML to t... See more

This stems from the structure of the web — it’s a tangle of links, a jumble of interconnected ideas. It fractalizes our attention, nudging us to leave fragments of our mind trapped in open tabs like a thousand tiny horcruxes — open loops feeding off our attention until they wither away, replaced by our latest distraction.

There’s a bottleneck here:

... See more

In a world where copies and fakes and phonies and phoning-it-in to do as little as possible are so common, doing something truly different that’s true to who we are and makes a meaningful difference in the world remains a special thing.

We fail to see, or refuse to accept, that any attempt to bring our ideas into concrete reality must inevitably fall short of our dreams, no matter how brilliantly we succeed in carrying things off—because reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control, and can’t possibly hope to meet our perfectionist standards. Someth... See more