phoebe

“These days, it’s easy to feel that we’ve fallen out of connection with one another and with the earth and with reason and with love. I mean: we have. But to read, to write, is to say that we still believe in, at least, the possibility of connection.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on

"AI can imitate outputs. It can predict patterns. It can accelerate execution. But it can’t carry moral weight. It can’t love. It can’t repent. It can’t take responsibility. It can’t look another human in the eye and choose courage over approval. It can’t suffer with someone. It can’t forgive. It can’t be faithful. And it can’t answer the question

Find a balance between accuracy and expression, between tradition and experimentation, between direction and discovery

“We have no chance of knowing whether we understand something until we test ourselves in some form. If we don’t try to verify our understanding during our studies, we will happily enjoy the feeling of getting smarter and more knowledgeable while in reality staying as dumb as we were.”

- Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

From Will Manidis:

The current generation of LLM-driven insanity — the billion dollar frameworks, the orchestration layers, the agentic workflows— is the most sophisticated tool-shaped object ever created.

You can build an agent that reads your email, summarizes the contents, drafts a response, checks the response against a style guide, routes the