Julian Paul

@julian

Rational optimist building internet things.

All cardsCollections

Any situation is fixable if you’re good with words because words literally make up the meaning infrastructure, control the traffic of desire, and reorient the posture of someone’s heart which is where the true center of gravity is in a person that makes them want to do anything

Sherry Ning substack.com

[people]

one of my psychology professor’s greatest hits: the closer someone is to you, the more you treat them as you treat yourself. it’s as though they eventually enter the sphere of your inner world. we have to stop being cruel to ourselves or we will be cruel to others, in time. i don’t make the rules and i don’t obey them... See more

girl substack.com

[self] and

random people’s hands in new york subway.

jericho substack.com

[photo]

Favorite quotes

Time for some more quotable quotes:

The patient inherit everything the impatient leave behind. — Shane Parish

Things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could. — Rudiger Dornbusch

I wouldn’t have seen it, if I didn’t believe it. — Marshall McLuhan

There are two kinds of people... See more

[mind]

The paradox is that it takes discipline to stay open. Detachment is the easy reflex, like closing a window at the first sign of rain; it costs nothing once the latch is turned. Remaining receptive requires stamina, you must let experiences in without letting them wash you away, stay permeable enough to feel yet solid enough not to dissolve at every... See more

Romanticism Is Not A Weakness

[love] and [people]

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
― Abraham Maslow

[mind]

Maybe cognitive minimalism— identifying which mental loops actually matter, and pruning the rest— isn't deprivation but liberation.

Parakeet • Skittle Factory Dementia Monkey Titty Monetization

[design] and

The problem is that LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness . Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone’s) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage. Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better — appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but... See more

The peril of laziness lost | The Observation Deck

[ai]

the function of your professional life is to find the most natural structure that allows you to turn the things you do as naturally as breathing or walking into compounding capital and joy over decades this, necessarily, requires rotating quickly out of things that aren't it

Will Manidis x.com

[mind]