Gurwinder

100 years ago in London, “knocker-uppers” earned sixpence a week shooting dried peas at windows to wake people for work. The job was eventually lost to automation, which was bad for Mary Smith here, but good for everyone who came after.

rarehistoricalphotos.com/knockers-up-...

Tribalism doesn’t just lead to false beliefs; false beliefs also lead to tribalism, because an idea that can’t stand on its own must survive through strength of numbers.

this is a very good summary of a particular set of tells. this is why it is often (ironically) hard to tell what the main point of an AI-written article is or when it gets there. it is constantly doing things to go "here's my main idea" that human writers do once per piece.

Ingmar Bergman’s description of the creative process accurately reflects how normal human reasoning works (according to the research). Intuition decides, then intellect justifies.

And if your problem is that you *do* stop to consider what you want, but still can’t figure it out, you probably have the opposite problem: instead of not thinking enough, you’re not living enough. To quote... err... myself:

Many people live entire lives they don’t want because they never stop for a few hours to consider what they actually want.

Iconic photo of Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu during the last twirl of her gold-winning performance. Reminds me of the phrase “Success is not the key to happiness, happiness is the key to success.” The best way to excel, in your craft and in your life, is to love what you do.

Of all Elon’s achievements, the most underrated is making Twitter such a shitshow that millions of people stopped being addicted to it. This has fixed far more brains than Neuralink.

A common sign of AI writing is that it’ll frequently signpost its own sentences: “this highlights”, “this underscores”, “here’s the kicker”, “now for the plot twist”, “the bottom line”, “the key takeaway”, “here’s why this matters”.

“The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say.”

—Deleuze

More people have been to China than I have.

You didn’t notice that the previous sentence doesn’t make sense, did you?

You swallow nonsense without knowing because you consume news without chewing. Slow down, and question what you see.

The more a person criticizes, the less attention their criticism is worth. The same is true of praise.

For Valentine’s Day, a thread of 10 of my favorite quotes about love:

“Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.”

—Jules Renard

Not everything worth defending can be neatly defined, but the more concretely you can define something, the more concretely you can defend and preserve it.

C. S. Lewis

“Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.”

—Ambrose Bierce

“The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn't exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently … Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.”

—Alain de Botton

“Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.”

―La Rochefoucauld

“Only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person—without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing...”

—Osho

“Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.”

—Nietzsche

“We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.”

―Anais Nin

“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”

—G.K. Chesterton

“We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single more than we love the partner who spared us that fate.”

—Alain de Botton

For Valentine’s Day, a thread of 10 of my favorite quotes about love:

“Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.”

—Jules Renard

It’s a great mercy that pregnant women receive ultrasounds instead of MRI scans.

Conservatives prioritize security over truth. Libertarians prioritize freedom over truth. Progressives prioritize social justice over truth. All forget that one cannot have security, freedom, or justice without prioritizing truth.

China will win video AI because of lax copyright laws.

The US will win text AI because of lax censorship laws.

Artistry requires not just creativity but also good taste, and AI can only grant the former. The coming age, then, will be an era of infinite creativity and infinitesimal taste, which will be won by those who can discern as well as design, and curate as well as create.

Automate only the skills you’re willing to lose.

The news exists not to inform us but to enthrall us. Like a strobe light, it dazzles us with over-illuminated moments, blinding us to all the others, until we view life as a flicker of disjointed snapshots, and can only dream what lies between.