Ulysses Chuang

Abstract office work, compared to “the job site” — which requires the worker to engage with reality as it is, to conform herself to its limits and demands, rather than to make demands of it — “can be a fairly paranoid place.” When you can’t “appeal to concrete standards,” you are “never quite sure where you stand — everything’s open to... See more

Tiago Forte, creator of Building a Second Brain , argues that a knowledge system isn’t about hoarding information; it’s about making it useful. His C.O.D.E. framework (Capture, Organize, Distill, Express) breaks this down:

• Capture the ideas and insights that spark your interest. A sticky note, a voice memo, or an app like Notion—whatever works.

... See more

a culture is, in this view, a form of intelligence that guides the life of the hyper-organism we are all cells of; so contributing to the unfolding of a living culture is contributing to the aliveness and unfolding of the vaster organism, the vaster Life we’re all part of.)

the gatekeepers are failing, so why not get rid of them altogether? — but setting that matter aside for a moment, how did it come to this? When did American fiction become a specialty pursuit, or more importantly (and here I am forced to wave away a bunch of arguments, also very popular on this platform, about MFAs, about how no one wants to... See more

Participant observation in a vastly alien cultural world is not just humbling, it’s like being a six-year-old in terms of cultural maturity. You either become curious about how to function better or leave in a frenzy of nonstop irritation at all the constant corrections. No one can give you a ‘download’ for a culture. And your Frommer’s guide does... See more

It’s also echoed beautifully in this quote by Viktor Frankl in his book Man’s Search for Meaning :

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

I love when Buddhism and psychology overlap like that.

To write a quatrain with an ABAB rhyme scheme, the poet must select the A rhymes in advance. Claude does this. It generates the first line, then deliberately plans ahead so that the second line ends with a word that rhymes with the first. This is not next-token prediction in the shallow sense. It is teleological composition. Claude does not just... See more

I’ve had this visual body of work inside me for years, a whole ecosystem of words-meet-images, macro and mega-scale, and what-the-heck-is-that-even-supposed-to-be creations, but I’ve been pushing it aside, waiting for the “right” time. When I finally have the money to just not care if anyone else cares. Or would pay for it.

But there is no right... See more

Meta-Writing. This refers to any writing that externalizes my thoughts so that I can sift through them. At least half of my writing is meta-writing. It’s refreshingly mundane; I write goals, plans, tasks, observations, and daydreams. I write to purge noise when my brain is too loud and to make noise when my brain is too quiet. It’s too mundane to... See more