Yihui

Disappointing people is practically a rite of passage in creating a life that is yours , rather than one your parents, family, friends or even a younger, more conditioned version of yourself might have imagined for you. Disappointing people is not something you should aim at, but something to accept as a potential side effect of honouring yourself.... See more

The insidiousness of how quickly social media immolates the creative impulse, shocks. Does it get you to “create” things? Sure, but within the bland confines of what the algorithm thinks you should create, what the algorithm “knows” will drive engagement. The mechanisms driving social media are “corrupt,” (in that their goals are not the goals of... See more

The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from “true” fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at... See more

Humans are members of a community of language-users inhabiting a shared world, and this primal fact makes them essentially different to large language models. We can consult the world to settle our disagreements and update our beliefs. We can, so to speak, “triangulate” on objective reality.

Stories like this are part of a pattern of experiences that show up again and again in social media. These patterns are the results of mechanisms like algorithms that optimize for engagement, concrete features that define our experience with technology.

These mechanisms, in turn, are the result of ways of thinking within technology companies.... See more

The internet is dying on the outside but growing on the inside.

Slop is the newly popular term for the garbage you see in tweets, LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, and websites more broadly that is so superficial, mediocre, and banal that the only reason people could possibly create it is to drive some metric they’re optimizing for: likes, views, clicks, whatever. Making slop has only gotten easier with AI, but... See more

These experiences are not going to be SEO optimized. Instead of being passively discovered via search, they’ll have to be so good that people seek them out. They’ll spread through word of mouth. People will one-up each other, create weirder, more unique, and more magical experiences. If they optimize for anything, it will be creativity.

The sad fact is that if someone doesn’t readily recognize my worth, there’s a good chance that they’re simply not willing to, no matter how much convincing I do. Or even if I do manage to convince them that I’m worthy, the validation that I earn feels hollow, because I know it’s conditional on me being a certain way. Either way, there isn’t room... See more