Quotes

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 ...

The main issue with social media is that we want them to be everything. We want them to be a place for casual interactions, for discovery, for news, for serious discourse. And that’s a mistake. Because the moment you put a stupid amount of people in one room and you let them do whatever they want the only reasonable outcome you can expect is chaos. Sure, you might get some positive results out of it but you’ll also likely get someone shitting in a corner and someone trying to fuck the power outlet. Because that’s the world we live in. Now sprinkle some nonsense AI on top of it all and Bob’s your uncle. ...

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. - A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short. ...

Write a lot. This is alpha and omega of writing advice, the beginning and the end, and it’s that way for a reason– I don’t know anyone who’s good writing who hasn’t also put in serious hours. – Nat Bennet