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From a status standpoint, TikTok’s social status currency is outcompeting everyone else right now. On the surface, it’s because TikTok’s users are engaging in a lot of high-status, high-engagement behaviour that’s entertaining and valuable. But deep down, none of that behaviour is new. It’s TikTok’s technology, completely below the waterline, that’... See more

Creativity: “I can’t get new ideas staring at a blank page. Creativity, for me, requires motion. When you go on a walk, you can turn your world into an idea-generating sensorium, and ideas will spring up from the most unlikely sources. There is one thing that’s absolutely certain about creativity: It’s an active process, not a passive one. The best... See more

True ambition in a poet seeks fame in the old sense, to make words that live forever. If even to entertain such ambition reveals monstrous egotism, let me argue that the common alternative is petty egotism that spends itself in small competitiveness, that measures its success by quantity of publication, by blurbs on jackets, by small achievement:

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But just as surely, another part of me wanted to manage the threat of  his  potential independence by subsuming him into myself. It was tempting to treat the baby as a prop for my own narratives of motherhood rather than as an independent person in his own right. But babies give no quarter to our preconceived ideas of what mothering them

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It is not surprising that most services are primarily constructed out of open source components. Anyone can attempt to copy a service or even re-instantiate the actual codebase, but an existing service with more users will have more useful state, and will be more desirable to new users. This creates a feedback loop, where more users beget more stat... See more