The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (via)
Quoting Dries Buytaert: A few years ago, I quietly adopted a small principle that has changed how I think about publishing on my website. […] The principle is: If a note can be public, it should be. Unconsciously, I am trying to do the same, as you might have noticed by the increased activity on this website. Maintaining consistency can be challenging, but it’s worth the effort.
Quoting Andreas: Blogging is a small niche these days. There isn’t much hype around it, nor is there any money to be made because the VC firms are all busy chasing the next big thing, whatever that might be once the AI hype dies off in a year or two. But it is still here, and I like it exactly because it’s not the hype technology of the day anymore. It isn’t commercialised, algorithmically curated and set up to make some other person rich. ...
Quoting Brent Simmons: Chatting with my friends about how I hate these fascist assholes doesn’t do a damn thing. Protests work. (Imperfectly, sure, with no guarantees. But it sure beats not protesting.) He’s attending No Kings today.
Quoting straight from Jim Nielsen’s note on LLM training on copyrighted data: As a broke teenager, the web was this strange wonderland where you could access all kinds of copyrighted material using tools developed by fringe individuals/communities: Napster, Kazaa, Torrents, Usenet, etc. These tools (at least in the beginning) weren’t really made for profit, just to subvert the gatekeepers (and yeah, steal their profits). Now — in a strange twist of irony — things seem to have flipped: ...
In the 2030s, intelligence and energy—ideas, and the ability to make ideas happen—are going to become wildly abundant. These two have been the fundamental limiters on human progress for a long time; with abundant intelligence and energy (and good governance), we can theoretically have anything else. – Sam Altman
I just watched an incredible interview with legendary tennis coach Darren Cahill, now coaching Jannick Sinner. The interview is outstanding and worth watching; Cahill is remarkable and a great communicator. In the final part, they’re talking about Jannick when Cahill drops an incredible Jannick quote: Don’t worry about criticism from someone you wouldn’t take advice from. That’s profound for a boy who’s just 23 years of age.
Dave Rupert, reasoning on why he likes books: Books are strange objects. Chapters and chapters of coherent research and lived experiences assembled by people who wanted to put it all down in one place. Edited by actual editors who like editing. Designed— down to the weight of the paper, the typography, and the illustration on the cover— to make the experience of reading it enjoyable. Books are uncanny and impractical objects. A terribly inefficient way to encode information from one brain to another, but an excellent way to tell a story. ...
Quoting Bryan Baun: Capability makes your life simpler. Tolerance, skills, knowledge, and health are always with you, wherever you go. They are assets but they take up no space. They are stored in your body. Some lack capability through no fault of their own, but anyone can increase their capability. It’s an investment that pays dividends every day.
Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better and it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money and that’s fine in low doses but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet you’re gonna die. – David Foster Wallace ...