Yihui

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

“The Instagram generation experiences the present moment as an anticipated memory.”

—Kahneman

My therapist got it. She is a woman who intuitively understands how things are linked even when I’m inarticulate. “You just really value connection,” she said.

It clicked at that moment: I said I liked fun, but she understood it as liking connection . I had never realized that for me the two were one.

I never wanted to carry the internet around in my pocket. It's too distracting and pulls me out of the present moment, fracturing my attention. I've tried switching to old-school black and white phones before, but always begrudgingly returned to using a smartphone due to the utility of it. The problem, however, is that it comes with too many... See more