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Language models need auteurs and creative directors, not “thumbs up if you liked this personality”

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A good life doesn’t ask you to be good at everything. It asks you to find the small circle where you have unusual leverage, and to be peacefully avera

My father was a Sarkari Babu (government officer with basic salary) his entire life, he was at one job throughout his life. He drove a Bajaj scooter

Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress - by kyla scanlon

The game has shifted, and the winning strategy with it. It’s no longer about understanding specialized details; it’s about grasping the high-level glo

What we do with our freedomThe examples of the excruciating etiquette of the aristocratic courts, the marriage market Rhimes dramatised, the civil ass

So much value and love for the process of writing and what it does for the coherence between heart, brain, imagination, lived reality, unseen, and see

You can’t write a viral essay that says “it’s complicated and I’m not sure.” But this is the only path to truly novel insight.

Writing is a task that takes both objective and subjective intelligence. LLMs ace the objective parts the same way they ace every test; you can’t faul

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The text actually moves back and forth between all of these. Few novels pay less attention to the rules of fiction than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

surprise may be a better proxy for creativity than quality. A polished output is not necessarily creative, but a surprising one might be. Yet even sur

Every system young men touch today extracts value while promising creation. College extracts tuition while promising knowledge. Jobs extract time whil

Someone said “it’s a privilege to be exhausted doing something you love” and I told them “go to hell.” Our bodies are not built to be exhausted. We

When startups start taking off, the founders usually can't tell what's changed. It's some combination of all the random things they did to make it ta

If you don’t have time to clean up, you don’t have time to cook Professionals understand that the project is the whole project, not simply the fun

Hindsight is 2020I don’t mean “hindsight is 20/20.” I’m talking about the year 2020.See, early in 2023, I wrote an article about starting and growing

A solid foundation requires a robust team structure. Hiring individuals who not only have the requisite skills but also align with the company’s cultu

The five principles of prompting I developed work equally well as management techniques for humans: Give direction. Describe the desired style in de

People who are good at solving poorly defined problems don't get the same kind of kudos. They don’t get any special titles or clubs. There is no test

2) Clear Roles & Decision Rights Without clear swim lanes and decision rights, individuals on teams feel disempowered and projects tend to stall out.

Through DJing, sampling, mixing, music embodies so much of what we’re exploring. It’s our job as builders to find references that “re-unlock” the valu

All authors are just very refined plagiarists, recombining tokens based on formulas to produce strings that copy patterns found in their input. “Intel

When something fits into a lucid, logical continuum, it’s generally remembered for how it (a) reinterprets the entity that influenced its creation, an

“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give th

An idea cannot truly go mainstream until it’s wrapped in a “meme” that compels people to recognize, understand, share, and invest time in it.

Memes may dominate how we communicate online, but in the last few years, their rapid spread has also necessitated the birth of a parallel, shadow ecos

Media and Machines.

Similarly, I wonder whether the creator economy, as it matures, will resemble less of its original promise (a way for people to do the things they lov

Curation leads to expertise. Through curation, you better understand yourself, history, and unlikely connections across fields. Increasingly, we will

we’ve always been influenced in what we find beautiful or valuable or important, of course, but what’s new is the speed at which one is inundated with

You can use algorithms to surface new things. But algorithms are not nearly as good as human curators yet. Whatever pattern matching is going on insid

How could gaining knowledge amount to anything other than discovering what was already there? How could the truth of a statement or a theory be anythi

That we can write the prompt or query is not an emblem of our freedom but of our surrender. We give up on what we think the words mean and let the mac

That is, they understand the purpose of chatbots and generative models to be the ability to force other people to see a particular version of reality.

ideas only become clear once you begin to work on them

The friction between idea and ability that AI evangelists promise to eradicate is not a problem suffered by a disadvantaged few. It’s the fundamental

the choice humanity faces in every age is between the idea of power and the power of ideas

“I would make sushi in my dreams. I would jump out of bed at night with ideas.” Leonardo Da Vinci, Michael Ferrero, and Colin Chapman all did the s