If you don’t give your life a direction, the world will give it a distraction.
11.01.2026 17:23
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If you don’t give your life a direction, the world will give it a distraction.
Ninety percent of success can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time without convincing yourself that you're smarter than you are.
David Foster Wallace on thinking:
“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”
The best are always learning.
Read like crazy.
Think alone.
Keep a journal.
Write stuff down the moment you see it.
Review regularly.
Memorize the big ideas to fluency.
Attack your best ideas.
And never get high on your own supply.
You don't have to be gifted. You do have to be deliberate.
It’s more like a dismissal of LLMs being the future of technology (they’re not even the future of AI)
Plato instead of Prozac as a way of life
twaclaw.github.io/posts/opinio...
You may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of it
“The replicant is not a person,” Lessig wrote, “it does not deliberate. It does not reflect. It just generates.”
open.substack.com/pub/centerfo...
“15 years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet.” - Noah Smith
It doesn’t matter what position you find yourself in right now. What matters is whether you improve your position today. Every ordinary moment is an opportunity to make the future easier or harder.
It's hilarious that they genuinely don't seem to understand the difference between "the entire body of scientific research into quantum physics" and "what I've kind of passively absorbed through pop culture over the past twenty years"
Jurassic Park is a perfect franchise because the question "why would they keep doing this" is answered by simply asking yourself if you would want to go see a dinosaur. Of course you would want to see a dinosaur.
Everyone wants the summary. But the summary is what's left after someone else decided what matters. Their priorities aren't yours. Their filters aren't yours. When you operate on summaries, you're thinking with someone else's brain.
Deep Blue is 30 years old and was capable of defeating chess grand champions. It could be housed in a single cabinet.
ChatGPT spans untold data centers devouring massive amounts of electricity and it got its ass whipped by an 8 bit gaming console from the 1970s.
Great news! Congratulations both!
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Don’t even need to loop, it is 8 hours long
https://youtu.be/JRnDYB28bL8?si=oVcN9i_GfEimXkkr
Is adam driver Linux compatible?
Watch how people discuss their problems.
They'll spend hours explaining why things are terrible, how unfair life is, and how others need to change. But suggest they might have the power to improve things and they suddenly have countless reasons why that's impossible.
It’s ironic how Palantir (mass surveillance) and Anduril (combat drones) borrow names from #LOTR - a saga warning against unchecked power and weaponized technology. The corporate rebranding of Tolkien’s anti-war themes reaches new heights of literary misinterpretation.
Hold strong, Canada and Mexico. Let our American people experience what voting for a totally unhinged moron actually means.
The wise of every generation discover the same truths.
Look, I know I was reading Ancient Greek literature for fun when I was in my early teens and that’s not exactly normal, but I will admit I am still a bit horrified that lots of adult Christopher Nolan fans seem to have never *heard* of Homer or the Odyssey.
Morning
Professor @jeffjarvis.bsky.social
