LettersJoules

On 9/15/26

Public · Design & Objects

Show my the incentives I’ll show you the outcomes

Open full size

Whodathunkit
Open full size

Open full size

Little · People & Society

People too much taken up with little things usually become incapable of big ones

my life's philosophy is that I will meet the person I could have been at the end of my life, and my goal is to reduce the difference between him and me to as little as possible

Psychologists distinguish between two forms of intelligence: fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence.

Fluid intelligence is your ability to process information quickly and solve novel problems you haven’t encountered before.

Crystallized intelligence is the knowledge you have accumulated over time, and your ability to use that knowledge.

These two forms of intelligence develop differently across your lifespan.

Fluid intelligence tends to decline as you get older. Crystallized intelligence tends to increase, because you continue accumulating knowledge and experience over time.

Formal education is useful for increasing crystallized intelligence. You learn more facts, concepts, vocabulary, and ways of thinking about the world.

Fluid intelligence, though, is much harder to change.

Inspiration & Quotes

😬

have you considered that your over thinking is masking your under feeling

Misc

Current models are getting close to PhD-level intelligence. After that, they're expected to achieve the intelligence of someone who decided not to do a PhD.

Earlier letters

On 9/14/26

Memes & Culture × People & Society

Explains stuff much more cleanly than just “social media use” although I’m guessing bit of that is captured here

Open full size

Inspiration & Quotes

A step backward after making a wrong turn is a step in the right direction

It is frequently the case that although we lack direct measurements of some variable, with a little ingenuity we can come up with another one that could serve as a proxy for the variable of interest.

Open this Letter

On 9/13/26

Mind · Inspiration & Quotes × People & Society

The law of life is the law of belief. A belief is a thought in your mind. Do not believe in things to harm or hurt you. Believe in the power of your subconscious to heal, inspire, strengthen, and prosper you. According to your belief it is done unto you

Once the subconscious mind accepts an idea, it begins to execute it. It's an interesting subtle truth that the law of the subconscious mind works for good and bad ideas alike.

One of the sources of unhappiness, fatigue, and nervous strain is inability to be interested in anything that is not of practical importance in one's own life. The result of this is that the conscious mind gets no rest from a certain small number of matters, each of which probably involves some anxiety and some element of worry.
The world is vast and our own powers are limited. If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. And to demand too much is the surest way of getting even less than is possible. The man who can forget his worries by means of a genuine interest in, say, the Council of Trent, or the life history of stars, will find that, when he returns from his excursion into the impersonal world, he has acquired a poise and calm which enable him to deal with his worries in the best way, and he will in the meantime have experienced a genuine even if temporary happiness.

Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.

Crystallizing public opinion

For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Public · Design & Objects

Clown is trying to run for sure

Open full size

You can only properly serve one customer, the kids or the teachers. The schooling system seems to have made a decision

Open full size

Inspiration & Quotes × AI & New Tech

The Abbasid caliphs had set the model for public debates on religion.
At one held at the caliphal court in the 830s, a Mutazila scholar took on an intimidated representative of the embattled Sunnis on the issue of whether man brings about his own actions (the Mutazila stance) or whether God does (the Sunni one). When the Sunni let his arm dangle at the elbow and asked, 'Who is moving this?" - he expected the answer to be God - the Mutazila responded, 'Someone whose mother is a whore?
The caliph approved.

Misc

Every thought is a cause, every condition an effect

"This Is Not a Phase" wedding veil by Holly Winter Couture, with metallic silver and ivory embroidery of the lunar cycle along the bottom edge

Open full size

“Do you believe in free will?”

Of course, what choice do I have?

Trying again is an act of rebellion

Never trying again is an act of submission

What is to give light must endure the burning

Open this Letter

On 9/12/26

Science, Nature & The Future × People & Society

A “sense of a foreshortened future”
versus the sense that “all is possible”

Open full size

A highly creative person who doesn't have an external project to invest their energy into will eventually destroy themselves from within because the only project they have is the project of "fixing" themselves and that becomes a never-ending project in which they always find the next thing that's wrong with them because they need to keep the project going because (creative) energy cannot disappear and keeps seeking expression but the only channel of expression they have is the one of "fixing" their "broken" self.

Public

Yeah that’s fucked I’m crying

Open full size

Real

Open full size

People & Society × Inspiration & Quotes

Enkoimesis: practice centered around sacred sleep, where people sought answers, remedies, or healing instructions through dreams.

Susan Sontag put it beautifully

mad people = people who stand alone + burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same

Misc

Elementary principle of decision-making: always do irreversible decisions last.

Open this Letter

On 9/11/26

Inspiration & Quotes × People & Society

We are such hypocrites that we view another person's suffering as punishment for their sins, yet regard our own suffering as a test!

Inspiration & Quotes × Memes & Culture

Our culture often confuses us by making us believe that stress and pressure are inherently bad...boredom is the greatest danger..Do not fall for this mentality of ease and comfort; we are actually tough creatures built to learn from and adapt to pressure

Design & Objects × People & Society

what tolerating anti-social behavior does to our public spaces:

"It’s a primary reason why we shy away from dense walkable spaces and instead move towards suburban sprawl.

People in the U.S. don’t respect, trust, or want to be around other random citizens, out of fear and disgust.

Japanese/European style urbanism—density, fantastic public transport, mixed-use zoning, that so many American tourists admire—can't happen here because there is a fine line between vibrant streets and squalid ones, and that line is public trust.

The U.S. is on the wrong side of it.

Simply put, nobody wants to be accosted by a stranger, no matter how infrequent, and until that risk is close to nil, people will continue edging towards isolated living.

It is why we “can’t have nice things” because we have to construct our infrastructure to be asshole-proof, and so we don’t build anything or build with a fortress mentality, stripping our public spaces down to the austere and utilitarian, emptying them of anything that can be vandalized."

Open this Letter

On 9/10/26

Inspiration & Quotes × People & Society

You’re never too old to restart

i wonder how often people in the 2020s use the opportunity afforded by a crisis- a messy divorce, a big career embarrassment- to start a totally new life somewhere else. by definition we wouldn't hear from them. we hear instead from people who crash out, and overindex on those

The onus is on us

The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. "Live," Nietzsche says, "as though the day were here." It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal —carries the cross of the redeemer not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.

Poverty humiliates men even to the extent of making them blush for their virtues

There are a ton of fundamental bugs in the Human Operating System...The higher you stick out, the more people want to chop you down.

Everything’s the same

The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn't separate from the rest of your existence.
If you're a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren't working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh?
It all goes together.

Public · Design & Objects

This is our edge. The most dynamic place in the world

Open full size

Beautiful

Open full size

Real

Open full size

You never know what worst luck your bad luck saved you from

Open full size

Damn

Open full size

That’s true

Open full size

Misc

You have always disliked authority because every fibre of your being knows you have enough talent to build a life on your own terms.

By deferring to the earthy authority of men, you are forfeiting ownership over a part of your soul in exchange for answers, direction, and recognition.

Open this Letter

On 9/9/26

Design & Objects

Open full size

Inspiration & Quotes

Kierkegaard really was that guy

Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion - and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion... while truth again reverts to a new minority.

Misc

Agency, is emergent from a evolutionary pressure of death

You must get up and move

Horizontal relationships: relationships based not on hierarchy but on recognizing mutual equality or, at least, equivalence

The rise of nonchalance is the death of passion. Chalanting only

Open this Letter

On 9/8/26

Money, Work & Power × People & Society

Even a soul submerged in sleep
is hard at work and helps
make something of the world.

There will never be a “right time”

There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.

"The things you tolerate set the standard for your life." - Scott Clary

Think about the things you are "tolerating" in your life and work, and how much different it might be if you didn't.

You are not stuck. There are so many incredible opportunities to level things up.

Inspiration & Quotes × People & Society

Populations are not static. People fail to get the dynamics of change between elections. Every large election brings ~4% fewer older voters and 5.5% additional young voters. And we know where different age groups stand wrt some issues.

Design & Objects

Yeah throw $ at it is possible

Open full size

Misc

A continent with no military is going to announce a security partnership with a country with no military 😭

Open full size

Open this Letter

On 9/7/26

Artist · Inspiration & Quotes × Design & Objects

Fear is the cheapest seat in the house, I’d like to see you living in better conditions

Everyone’s terrified, convinced the studios don’t need artists anymore. It’s the artist that doesn’t need the studios.

View post on X

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.

The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities. The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do. The lover who never risks loving mocks romance. The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself. And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live.

Public · Design & Objects

You don’t hate journos enough

Open full size

A must read
https://open.substack.com/pub/edwest/p/doomscrolling-ourselves-to-death?r=36pad&utm_medium=ios

Open full size

The translated from Chinese instead of simplified Chinese is the real insight here, he’s talking directly to Taiwan

Open full size

Money, Work & Power

Giving my clankers the day off for Labor Day

Memes & Culture

Hiphop would be full blown corporate CIA drug dealer gang poison music if it wasn’t for Ye

Misc

It's not winter that defeats you. It is your insistence on summer

To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralized nation tells demoralized stories to itself.

Open this Letter

On 9/6/26

Inspiration & Quotes

You will serve something, choose wisely

I think I'm ready to go back to church.
I haven't found Jesus yet, but I've seen enough of Satan.

Design & Objects

Never cared never will

Open full size

Misc

This type of engine doesn’t run off of greed

Hands occupied by blessings can hold grudges

Open this Letter

On 9/5/26

Public · Design & Objects

Open full size

Every time

Open full size

Lmfao b like that

Open full size

Money, Work & Power

What’s more important, the journey or destination?

The company

Misc

Martyr? I thought you said murder.

Oh well, okay. Never mind then, I'm busy

That’s gotta hurt

View post on X

Praying to the Greek Goddess of memory (Mnemosyne) about the problem (dementia)

Looks maxxing is a great primer for transhumanism and I think we're underrating how useful it will be in ushering that new era in.

Open this Letter

On 9/4/26

Design & Objects

Sisyphean

Open full size

People & Society × Inspiration & Quotes

People will be in Hell thinking they’re in heaven and tell you that you need to do what they do to get into heaven

V timely

These patients present an unusual degree of self-reference in their interactions with other people, a great need to be loved and admired by others, and a curious apparent contradiction between a very inflated concept of themselves and an inordinate need for tribute from others. Their emotional life is shallow.

They experience little empathy for the feelings of others, they obtain very little enjoyment from life other than from the tributes they receive from others or from their own grandiose Fantasies, and they feel restless and bored when external glitter wears off and no new sources feed their self-regard. They envy others, tend to idealize some people from whom they expect narcissistic supplies, and to depreciate and treat with contempt those from whom they do not expect anything (often their former idols). In general, their relationships with other people are clearly exploitative and sometimes parasitic. It is as if they feel they have the right to control and possess others and to exploit them without guilt feelings-and behind a surface which very often is charming and engaging, one senses coldness and ruthlessness. Very often such patients are considered to be "dependent" because they need so much tribute and adoration from others, but on a deeper level they are completely unable really to depend on anybody because of their deep distrust and depreciation of others.

His · Inspiration & Quotes × Science, Nature & The Future

P accurate, but there is evil going to turkey to hide their true nature

The hairline index never misses: the purer a man’s heart is, the better his hairline

Napoleon was exiled and ended up using that energy to level Elba up. Energy is a choice

In his 300 days as Elba's ruler, Napoleon ordered and oversaw massive infrastructure improvements: building roads and draining marshes, boosting agriculture and developing mines, as well as overhauling the island's schools and its entire legal system.

Misc

If goofing around is a crime, I am a felon

Open full size

God save me from my friends, for from my enemies, I can save myself.

What you don't understand could fill libraries.

The gap between who you are and who you’re becoming isn’t distance, time, or circumstances. It’s simply frequency, which can shift in an instant. A quantum jump, not journey. A tuning.

Open this Letter

On 9/3/26

Money, Work & Power × Inspiration & Quotes

MBA consensus is the funniest inverse indicator

Funny that everyone who wanted to make money in the mid 2000s learned to speak Chinese and everyone who wanted to do international development learned Arabic

If everything around you is falling apart, you always start by looking in the mirror first. That’s a common denominator

Preach

Impatience is such a great trait...it doesn't get enough credit.
Patience is solid for long-term vision & compounding results...but impatience & push make it possible to get there.
Patience gets all the credit.
Impatience does all the work.

Inspiration & Quotes × AI & New Tech

This is not a decision made for the benefit of children.
Why? If it were, they would be aggressively testing AI tutoring and measuring the results.

This is a political choice made for the teachers, the union would never let ai relegate them to what they truly are: glorified babysitters

Time and time again, research has shown that the best way to improve learning is personalized 1:1 tutoring

AI is the first technology that gives every kid the best world-class tutor specifically personalized to them

NYC bans it

People & Society

As social conditions and opportunities improve, social frustration grows more quickly.

My least favorite phrase in the entire English language is ‘do not attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence.’ Because if you’ve ever spent a moment in the real world, you would know that the most malicious people are also extremely incompetent.

Design & Objects

Tasting menus

Open full size

Inspiration & Quotes

I prefer September. It is more feminine, more subtle, more mysterious. It resembles a spring seen in a dream.

Churchill spitting

You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.

Misc

You’re just scared, like a rookie. You’re like a kid at a talent show with a number pinned to your shirt.

You’ve got nothing or you would’ve shown me by now.

So get out, thank you, have a nice day

The real nineteenth century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.

Would never want to switch with anyone honestly

Source: anyhumanever.com

Open this Letter

On 9/2/26

Design & Objects

Open full size

End · Inspiration & Quotes × People & Society

Rip

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.
He went flying down the river in his boat with his video camera to his eye, making a moving picture of the moving river upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly toward the end of his vacation. He showed his vacation to his camera, which pictured it, preserving it forever: the river, the trees, the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat behind which he stood with his camera preserving his vacation even as he was having it so that after he had had it he would still have it. It would be there. With a flick of a switch, there it would be. But he would not be in it. He would never be in it.

At the extreme end, in some species, high-status females can actually prevent other females from reproducing altogether. They do this by stressing lower-status females so badly that they cease ovulating. Failing that, a high-status mother might kill another mother's baby or even physically expel the woman entirely from the social group.

Inspiration & Quotes × Money, Work & Power

Capitalism has more often than not been declared the culprit in this historical destruction of communities...the truth is, the political state, by its incessant centralization and bureaucratization of power, has done far more...to effect this destruction

The duality of man

On August 10, 1897, Felix Hoffmann, a chemist with the Bayer Company, synthesized acetylsalicylic acid from willow bark; it went on sale as Aspirin and conquered the globe. Eleven days later the same man invented another substance that was also to become world famous: diacetyl morphine, a derivative of morphine-the first designer drug. Trademarked as Heroin, it entered the market and began its own campaign. "Heroin is a fine business,"

Misc

Beliefs as a medium instead of monuments

Insurance terms that go hard:

Moral Hazard
Winner’s Curse
Adverse Selection
Pure Premium
Subrogation
Concurrent Causation
Utmost Good Faith
Fortuitous Loss
Force Majeure
Acts of God

Open this Letter

On 9/1/26

Inspiration & Quotes × Memes & Culture

There’s obviously something we need to dig into. Blanket blaming social media or smartphones is ridiculous especially when you use data which sure is correlated with smartphone/social media take off but had definitional changes at the same time

Rising reports of suicidal behaviors in children and adolescents have led to the recognition of a youth mental health crisis. However, reported rates can be influenced by access to screening and changes in reporting conventions, as well as by changes in social stigma. Using data on all hospital visits in New Jersey from 2008-2019, we investigate two inflection points in adolescent suicide-related visits and show that a rise in 2012 followed changes in screening recommendations, while a sharp rise in 2016-2017 followed changes in the coding of suicidal ideation. Rates of other suicidal behaviors including self-harm, attempted suicides, and completed suicides were essentially flat over this period. These results suggest that underlying suicide-related behaviors among children, while alarmingly high, may not have risen as sharply as reported rates suggest. Hence, researchers should approach reported trends cautiously.

Design & Objects

Open full size

Inspiration & Quotes

Prob the only banger Freud had

We have long observed that every neurosis has the effect, and so probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from reality.

It's hard to recognize that your whole being, your soul doesn't move at the speed of your cognition. That it could take you a year to really know something that you intellectually believe in a second.

Misc

Speed turns the point into a line

Open this Letter

On 8/31/26

Control · Inspiration & Quotes

To extend one’s memory through deeds: this is the work of courage.

He feigns hope in his face, and presses the pain deep in his heart

The paradox of the will centers on the problem of desire. I can very often will what I want (I am capable enough), but the wanting itself is not under my control. My desires are fickle and destructive, and once they take hold, they become impossible to resist. Attention, for Weil and for Murdoch, is a way of enlarging one's desire for good.
We find a focal point that appears to contain the good, we look at it, we wait, and over time, if we're patient, our will becomes aligned with it.

Every Roman was surrounded by slaves. The slave and his psychology flooded ancient Italy, and every Roman became inwardly, and of course unwittingly, a slave. Because living constantly in the atmosphere of slaves, he became infected through the unconscious with their psychology. No one can shield himself from such an influence.

It is important to clarify that optimism is not the same as hope. Hope is an emotional state most closely related to wishing for important - but less likely - outcomes that are more out of our control. Optimists go further in that they believe outcomes will be better and so work harder, longer and persevere when pessimists give up.

Public · Design & Objects × People & Society

The human condition doesn’t change? Whodathunkit

Open full size

Cannot shield yourself, environment is too important

Open full size

Actually · Inspiration & Quotes × People & Society

Cognitive dissonance is not a synonym for "hypocrisy." Hypocrisy is when someone's stated values and behavior conflict. Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable mental state that may occur when the person notices the conflict and actually cares that it exists. However, if the person doesn't care, or they've already resolved the conflict such that it doesn't bother them anymore, then there's no cognitive dissonance. Remember, cognitive dissonance is a state of discomfort. No discomfort means no cognitive dissonance,

You are what you are

Every man is born with qualities he can't ever change. Trying to fix them actually worsens his condition
Doesn't matter if you like the quality, or if other people do either. It's yours to utilize & embrace

Misc

The beauty you see everywhere is a mirror of what lives in you.

I know the harshness you have towards others is a mirror of how you speak to yourself, which is a mirror of how someone spoke to you once when you were young and did not deserve anything but gentleness. Still, I want to shake you sometimes and say: yes you are brilliant, yes everything you say is true, but there are a million true things around you, all the time, that you could notice instead. Is this really where you want your attention to go? To have the ability to see in the dark and to only look for what is missing.

Open this Letter

On 8/30/26

People & Society

Now our ability to reason has often been claimed to be what distinguishes us from other species; so it seems somewhat paradoxical, on first thought, to mechanize that which is most human. Yet even the ancient Greeks knew that reasoning is a patterned process, and is at least partially governed by statable laws. Aristotle codified syllogisms, and Euclid codified geometry; but thereafter, many centuries had to pass before progress in the study of axiomatic reasoning would take place again.

This is why we must keep making shit up, the people are no longer visualizing metaphors that are embedded in language, directly correlated with loss of whimsy imo

Language goes stale incredibly quickly. A metaphor works, everyone uses it, and eventually we stop having to construct anything at all.

Helping one person might not change the world, but it will change the world for that person. Therefore it’s important to do

Working · Inspiration & Quotes

Working is the best and most productive escape. If you can wield it wisely

Overworking is a modern vice. You get lost in a thousand little things that don't matter so you have an excuse to avoid the 2-3 big things that are heavy, difficult, and important. Work becomes a tool not for power, or even happiness, but evasion...

Overwork, curiosity and sympathy—our modern vices.

Only the pronoied survive

My new age friends call that state of being pronoia, the opposite of paranoia. Instead of believing everyone is out to get you, you believe everyone is out to help you. Strangers are working behind your back to keep you going, prop you up, and get you on your path. The story of your life becomes one huge elaborate conspiracy to lift you up. But to be helped you have to join the conspiracy yourself; you have to accept the gifts.

Misc

The man that waits for the perfect shot will die with a full magazine

Trust = Knowledge + Intention

Being knighted feels like it’d be a bit annoying. Like you couldn’t have done it on your own you needed to be in their good graces in order to do what you do.

Perhaps spirituality is simply returning to what we were as children—honest, curious, unafraid to be exactly who we are.

Some of you need real problems. Your mind’s conjuring nonsense because it’s bored

The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving.

The fastest way to kill something special is to compare it to something else.

Open this Letter

On 8/29/26

Design & Objects

Open full size

Inspiration & Quotes × People & Society

Attention is prophecy. Where you direct it determines what kind of world you perceive, and what kind of self you become. This is why belief matters, because an active lens through which the world is rendered. The more you attend to something, the more real it becomes.

Misc

It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we must do what is required.

Ambition, like all disordered passions, is a violent and unthinking delirium. ... Like a fire fed by a pitiless wind, it only burns out after having consumed everything in its path.

Open this Letter

On 8/28/26

Public · Design & Objects

Open full size

Premium mediocre, airport loungification I hate these people

Open full size

Some days this is exactly what you need

Open full size

Inspiration & Quotes × AI & New Tech

A lot of tech industry personality behaviors are simply a reflection of people not being confident and happy about themselves. Lot of high school, college, and young adult stuff playing out much later and more visibly for many who skipped various of those social stages.

Take · Inspiration & Quotes

You would give up your dreams in order to escape your nightmares and I would not.
I think it's a bad bargain.

If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.

When peoples joys are too great, we respond with envy. If others sorrows are too small we don't take them seriously. Thus: we are prone to sympathize with other peoples small joys and great sorrows.

AI & New Tech

https://aipolcom.net/
Color me shocked when technology takes political preferences of the creators

Misc

You have the right to action alone, but never to its fruits.

If you just did something like go to the supermarket and experienced it fully without the goggles of habit and categories you would go crazy with pure sense and joy.

Joy is your birthright. It can be found anywhere, at any time. Telling yourself you have to be a specific way before you can experience joy is just a way to avoid the joy that is waiting for you to recognize it.

If you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.

There is nothing worse on this earth than the critic who lives to condemn whatever emerges, to capture whatever escapes their frame and discipline any free new passion

Open this Letter

On 8/27/26

Public · Design & Objects

Premium mediocre is perfect

Open full size

If you not playing tennis those shits are sneakers

Open full size

It’s insane really

Open full size

Inspiration & Quotes

Like all men, he was simply given bad times in which to live.

AI & New Tech

Need 10 https://pollen-robotics.com/microduck/

Money, Work & Power

Teach him the value of hard work. Then give him everything he wants for no reason.

Misc

New mnemonic for Great Lakes : SHAME

The ability to discern discomfort or pain is an important skill to master

Open this Letter

On 8/25/26

Know · Inspiration & Quotes

Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man.
You take a step towards him, he takes a step back.
Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man.

Hemingway put it best

No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow caretul.

One must never despair upon losing something, whether it is an individual or an experience of joy or happiness; everything returns even more magnificently. What has to decline, declines; what belongs to us, stays with us, for everything works according to laws that are greater than our capacity for understanding and that only seem to contradict us. You have to live within yourself and think of all of life, all of its millions of possibilities, openings, and futures in relation to which there exists nothing that is past or has been lost.

Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific
fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth.

Druck preaching

There's a reason I moved from an English major to being an economics major. I'm not embarrassed by it. I write everything using Al now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems. I don't know why this is relevant. My name is on the piece. It's my message.

Maybe this has been the core belief of procrastination all along

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

Design & Objects

Curiosity is the sauce

Open full size

Misc

Ineffable ≠ Not Real

Rich and poor are feelings, not numbers

No, you’re not perfect, but you’re not your mistakes

Such a lovely woman

Open full size

Open this Letter

On 8/24/26

Reciprocal · Inspiration & Quotes

Edmund Burke, against Locke's idea that darkness is not naturally an idea of terror:

'[I]n utter darkness, it is impossible to know in what degree of safety we stand; we are ignorant of the objects that surround us; we may every moment strike against some dangerous obstruction; we may fall down a precipice the first step we take; and if an enemy approach, we know not in what quarter to defend ourselves; in such a case strength is no sure protection; wisdom can only act by guess; the boldest are staggered, and he who would pray for nothing else towards his defence, is forced to pray for light.'

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.

It's very easy to turn a good reciprocal relation into a bad reciprocal relation, but it's very difficult to turn back a bad reciprocal relation into a good one — very, very difficult — and that's the problem of mankind.

Human relations are an unending exercise in mutual imitation — the essence of which is perfectly captured by a not wholly transparent word, ‘reciprocity.’ A relationship may be benevolent and peaceable, or it may be malicious and belligerent. In either case, curiously, it does not cease to be reciprocal. This is very important [in understanding] imitation, whose role is everywhere and always [underestimated].

We are like chameleons, we take our hue and the color of our moral character, from those who are around us.

People & Society

Meat proxy
A person who forwards Al-generated text, code, or other output without reading, understanding, or validating it. The person acts only as a relay between the Al system and the intended recipient.

Money, Work & Power × Science, Nature & The Future

Energy is the foundation of everything
It is one of the four resources: money, time, health, and energy that you can only impact by how you take care of yourself and live your life.
Energy is a prerequisite that dictates everything else. From the type of day you will have to the year and what you have managed to achieve in it.

Misc

Most problems dissolve at walking speed

Open this Letter

On 8/23/26

Png · Design & Objects

Open full size

Jeweled medieval chess playing robot commissioned by Dries Van Noten

Open full size

Real one

Open full size

Meow Fuji

Open full size

Knowledge · Inspiration & Quotes

I'm doing badly, I'm doing well, whichever you prefer;

IT IS NOT THE CRITIC WHO COUNTS; NOT THE MAN WHO POINTS OUT HOW THE STRONG MAN STUMBLES, OR WHERE THE DOER OF DEEDS COULD HAVE DONE THEM BETTER. THE CREDIT BELONGS TO THE MAN WHO IS ACTUALLY IN THE ARENA, WHOSE FACE IS MARRED BY DUST AND SWEAT AND BLOOD; WHO STRIVES VAL-IANTLY; WHO ERRS, WHO COMES SHORT AGAIN AND AGAIN, BECAUSE THERE IS NO EFFORT WITHOUT ERROR AND SHORTCOMING; BUT WHO DOES ACTUALLY STRIVE TO DO THE DEEDS; WHO KNOWS GREAT ENTHUSIASMS, THE GREAT DEVOTIONS; WHO SPENDS HIMSELF IN A WORTHY CAUSE; WHO AT THE BEST KNOWS IN THE END THE TRIUMPH OF HIGH ACHIEVEMENT, AND WHO AT THE WORST, IF HE FAILS, AT LEAST FAILS WHILE DARING GREATLY, SO THAT HIS PLACE SHALL NEVER BE WITH THOSE COLD AND TIMID SOULS WHO NEITHER KNOW VICTORY NOR DEFEAT

Leave behind that face of hatred, be good now, we were mistaken, we shall begin again.

Optimism bias (also called unrealistic optimism) is the widespread tendency for people to overestimate the likelihood of positive personal outcomes and underestimate the likelihood of negative ones, relative to objective probabilities or relative to other people.

It is one of the most consistent and robust cognitive biases documented in psychology and behavioral economics. It appears in roughly 80% of the population and is notably reduced or absent in people with clinical depression.

There are many paths to enlightenment. Be sure to take the one with a heart.

You were whole before the carving began.

This duality can be pursued further and is related to a duality between past and future and the notions of control and knowledge. Thus we may have knowledge of the past but cannot control it; we may control the future but have no knowledge of it.

A plans an excuse for not living today

The king himself rode a horse and shot arrows at a deer. However, the horse stumbled, causing him to fall off, but he was not injured. Looking around, he said, "Do not let the historians know about this. "

There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

Nature doesn’t punish or reward. It’s indifferent

Nature does not punish the evil, it punishes the weak.

Greek word σχολή from which we get “scholar” means “leisure” or “free time”

The way to acquire esoteric knowledge is by following your curiosity wherever it leads,

Camus, you never lied

There is nothing more rebellious than finding joy in something that's supposed to be our punishment.

Schopenhauer knew my pain

I am now so old that young girls call me 'sir' without lying. The final cruelty of time.

We don’t negotiate with therapists

Once I went to see a psychiatrist. I was doing something that had become a pattern that I kept repeating in life, and I thought: "Well, I should talk to a psychiatrist." When I entered the office, I asked him: "Do you think this process could affect my creativity in any way?" And the psychiatrist answered me: "Well, David, I have to be honest with you: it could." I shook his hand and left.

People & Society × Design & Objects

But people want meth so we will continue

Source: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

There is a Japanese practice of owning one very good version of something rather than several adequate ones.

One knife, kept sharp. One pen that writes exactly as you want. One bag chosen carefully and used for years.

This is not minimalism as aesthetic. This is minimalism as relationship.

You learn the object. You know its weight. You know how it responds to your hand.

The object becomes, over time, an extension of you.

That cannot happen with things you do not stay with long enough to know.

Misc

The purpose of a book of meditations is to teach you how to think and not to do your thinking for you.
Consequently if you pick up such a book and simply read it through, you are wasting your time. As soon as any thought stimulates your mind or your heart you can put the book down because your meditation has begun. To think that you are somehow obliged to follow the author of the book to his own particular conclusion would be a great mistake. It may happen that his conclusion does not apply to you. God may want you to end up somewhere else. He may have planned to give you quite a different grace than the one the author suggests you might be needing.

The cosmic joke will continue until laughing at yourself improves

You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.

Flow is the sacred dance of surrender and trust

Intuition is the river of purpose flowing through you and unconsciousness is a dam

Clark's Law:
As production costs near zero, the value of creativity approaches infinity.

You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return.

Open this Letter

On 8/22/26

Public · Design & Objects

Everyone’s just winging it
Open full size

Open full size

The I can do whatever the fuck I want, you can’t fire me of haircuts

Open full size

I love humanity

Open full size

Money, Work & Power

The scariest part of the advancements in aging is the increasing hold boomers have over governance and power

Power has never transitioned peacefully. It's always been forced through either natural forces like aging or actual coercion and murder. Reduction of the former we might just be reverting to more violence

People & Society

No one knows where the border between non-intelligence and intelligent behavior lies; in fact, to suggest that a sharp borderline exists is probably silly. But essential abilities for intelligence are certainly:

to respond to situations very flexibly;

to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances;

to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages; to recognize the relative importance of different elements of a
situation;

to find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them;

to draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which
may link them;

to synthesize new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them together in new ways;

to come up with ideas which are novel.

Misc

You’re too young to be playing defense

Open this Letter

On 8/21/26

Public · Design & Objects

Origin of Oregan has been up for debate

Open full size

This is so real

Open full size

No use crying over

Open full size

You can also see these in real life if you squint

Open full size

Stress

Open full size

It’s really that easy

Open full size

Weight · Inspiration & Quotes

You shall learn how salt is the taste of another man’s bread, and how hard is the way that goes up and down another man’s stairs.

You buried your joy beneath the weight of a single unanswered prayer, while a thousand answered ones lay at your feet.

The certain heart receives nothing. God walks past it like a field that has already been harvested there is nothing to plant into hard ground. The trembling heart the stupid, embarrassing one receives everything

I don't pay attention to the world ending.
It has ended for me many times
& began again in the morning.

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

Ancient Roman roads used small white stones called cats' eyes that reflected moonlight, acting as street lighting. Made from marble or limestone, they improved visibility, guiding pedestrians, chariots, and soldiers at night in cities like Pompeii.

Why young children's heads are so big relative to their bodies: most energy resources are being diverted to the brain during the early years. The newborn brain...represents 10% of the infant's body weight, whereas the adult brain is about 2%

People & Society

People will be angry that the sky is blue

Money, Work & Power

I’ll take the job, but I want to be paid in poems

Misc

The purpose of a system is what it does. There is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do

Our ancestors didn't call it Neurodivergent.
The Seer.
The Healer.
The One Who Knows.

ME: Good morn—

PHD: It’s “doctor.”

Congratulations! You’ve made it to the next level. Your next opponent is you

Open this Letter

On 8/20/26

Public · Design & Objects

Victorian-era mechanical fan-parasol

Open full size

Inspiration & Quotes

Be like that

He's like a boxer that needs to get hit before he gives you his full attention

Endless optionality is a trap

A lot of you are cheating yourselves out of so much genuine happiness by never committing to a single thing in your entire lives

Five minutes after birth, they decide your name, religion, nationality, and sect.
And you spend the rest of your life defending what you did not choose.

Memes & Culture

Memes embed themselves into our personal and collective consciousness. cynical memes can become psychohazards just as easily as hopeful ones can restore a sense of possibility

Misc

The harder something gets, the more locked in you get

Open this Letter

On 8/19/26

Inspiration & Quotes × People & Society

Shitty food makes the difference on sleep inertia

There’s also another possibility: you’re describing sleep inertia. Normally yours sounds extremely low—you wake and immediately move. If something causes even modestly poorer sleep or causes you to wake from a deeper sleep stage, suddenly you’ll experience that “gravity” that other people commonly have in the morning. That doesn’t necessarily mean your actual energy reserves are low.

Inspiration & Quotes

Just a lil off kilter

Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.

You cannot fake the light in your eyes

In esoteric traditions, "depth in the eyes" is often treated as a sign that there is something behind the surface personality - a sense of inner life, consciousness, or presence that seems to look back at you.

Public · Design & Objects

Open full size

Thank you for your attention to this matter el Sid, appreciate it

Open full size

Alignment is crucial

Open full size

Olive oil is way too expensive, I know I can’t say why

Open full size

“My new old chair”

Open full size

Misc

In Dostoevsky’s novel “The Possessed,” it was the sons of rich boomers who were the most in love with socialism. Not the poor. The more things change, the more things stay the same

Interesting
https://open.substack.com/pub/worksinprogress/p/daycare-barely-matters?r=36pad&utm_medium=ios

Open this Letter

On 8/18/26

Public · Design & Objects

Open full size

If they had just let frontier and spirit merge we could’ve avoided all of this. Also just fb marketplace levels of lowballing going on

Open full size

Retrograding food is insane but I’m intrigued

Open full size

Science, Nature & The Future

Intuition is memory from the future

Misc

The only man that can bring peace in the Middle East 😭

Open full size
Open full size

Open this Letter

On 8/17/26

Public

Open full size

Yeah, death penalty

Open full size
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/grading-the-worlds-shortest-manifesto

Evergreen

Open full size

Public · Inspiration & Quotes

Mental improvement is about becoming less dangerous on your worst days.

Mental improvement is less about peak performance and more about floor management.

Ratchet Principle: the goal isn't to think brilliantly on your best days but to raise the floor of your worst days so that when you're tired, stressed, and running on bad coffee, you still make acceptable decisions instead of catastrophic ones

Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome

As Lindblom observes, "Seals are easily trained because they have an appetite for fish." Corporations are also relatively easy to control, because they have an appetite for money. To extend the metaphor, trying to get corporations to care about the public interest, rather than simply maximizing profit, is like trying to persuade the seal that he should love jumping through hoops, rather than eating fish. It's much easier just to give him a fish whenever he succeeds in jumping through the hoop.

Such a thin line

The central paradox...any given polity...must create a military establishment strong and effective enough to protect the state. On the other hand, it must somehow ensure that this same military establishment does not turn on the state that created it.

Revolution is not a dinner party

A year after Mao had done away with his rivals there came the Great Terror, in which hundreds of thousands more perished according to killing quotas set by Mao himself...the chairman reminded his public that 'Revolution is Not a Dinner Party.

Inspiration & Quotes × People & Society

Evergreen

AI will do to everyone what the Internet has been doing for 20 years, just more so: it'll make the smart people smarter, and the dumb people dumber. It'll empower those with agency, and turn the slothful into NPCs.

No amount of 'alignment' or policy will much change that.

Sleep is so important

Recordings of neural activity in rodents show that firing sequences recorded in assemblies of hippocampal place cells during waking behavior are replayed during slow-wave sleep, this coordination could be when recent memories end up becoming remote memories

Misc

So cool

Source: nytimes.com

Open this Letter

On 8/16/26

Beautifully · Inspiration & Quotes × People & Society

We've come so far. The future is so bright

For most of history, surgery was done without anesthesia.

Fruit was a luxury: people used to rent pineapples to show them off at parties.

Beautifully put, grateful, but onwards.

All the items in this room were once out of reach; some not yet invented, others too rare or costly for the vast majority of people. Today, most of us lucky enough to live with them walk past without a second thought.
It is to humanity’s credit that we remain restless in the midst of all of this progress. We continue to look forward, pushing the frontier further with new treatments, new tools, and new institutions that will help future generations in ways we can’t even picture yet.
But our lives today are a gallery of past generations’ heroic efforts to do the same. It serves us, and honors them, to recapture whenever possible the old sense of awe at these wonders that have long since become commonplace.

Nietzsche don’t miss

Whatever is done out of love takes place beyond good and evil.

Beautifully put

Whatever happens in a city, happens in a uber. The roads are the cardiovascular system of a city.

If you’re doing something that’s easy, it could be valuable but you’re about to get your ass whooped. Or it’s just not valuable

Public · Design & Objects

We need to bring back stained glass exit signs

Open full size

Beautiful

Open full size

Mhmm interesting

Open full size

Science, Nature & The Future

Chaos is the law of nature and order is the dream of man

AI & New Tech

AI;DR

(AI; didn’t read)

Open this Letter

On 8/15/26

Public · Design & Objects

Open full size

Lmfaoo that’s tough

Open full size

If you think you can or cannot, you are right

Open full size

all 9

Open full size

Real

Open full size

World · Inspiration & Quotes × People & Society

St. Francis of Assisi:

Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.

The world is a very puzzling place. If you're not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else's mind.

Beautifully put

I don't call experiences good or bad anymore. Only revelatory, because everything changes me
in the way I needed to be changed. I'm bad at predicting desire. The body, intelligent and perceptive, recognizes a source of immeasurable craving could emerge entirely unexpected - pungent blue cheese, tres leches sponge cake, gamey wild duck, stuffed pimento olives, chocolate soft serve.
To be warped by something is to know it forever. Recursion is gorgeous. But some advice against comfort: you do things in the world and you either like it or don't, and always, you learn. This is the point of internships, subleases, backpacking adventures and sabbaticals, though true submersion requires you to choose a thing again and again.

If you take objects out of a room, one by one, two things will happen. The first is obvious. You will miss some of the things you have taken away. The second is that you will notice the things that remain more than ever. Your attention will focus. You will be more likely to read the books that are left on the shelves. You will appreciate the remaining chairs more. And if there is a chess board, you are more likely to play chess. When things are taken from us, the stuff that remains has more value. It rises not only in visibility but also intensity. What we lose in breadth we gain in depth.

Money, Work & Power

At a certain level, a lot of your most impactful work will be based on instinct.

Inspiration & Quotes × Science, Nature & The Future

Past a certain age, a man no longer speaks in terms of should or could, but instead is and will.

He ceases to live in the irrealis of the subjunctive and conditional, preferring the hard indicative and future tenses.

The hour grows late for hypotheticals and counterfactuals.

Misc

The universe rewards intensity of process but deeply punishes identification with outcome.

Light has no shadow

A co-conspirator is a beautiful way of putting it
https://www.thirdoikos.com/p/is-your-marriage-a-conspiracy-against

Open this Letter

On 8/14/26

Public · Design & Objects

Evergreen

Genius

Nah

Terrible mix up

Man · Inspiration & Quotes × People & Society

When I see a man infatuated with logic, I wager at once that he is not logical.

These fucking boomers will never understand

In the way that you can’t really understand what it’s like to be a parent until you have kids, you can’t really understand how it feels to own property until it’s yours. We are on our second generation of people being locked out of ownership, confused why they are socialists.

Of all ridiculous things in the world what strikes me as the most ridiculous of all is being busy in the world, to be a man quick to his meals and quick to his work. So when, at the crucial moment, I see a fly settle on such a businessman's nose, or he is bespattered by a carriage which passes him by in even greater haste, or the drawbridge is raised, or a tile falls from the roof and strikes him dead, I laugh from the bottom of my heart.
And who could help laughing? For what do they achieve, these busy botchers! Are they not like the housewife who, in confusion at the fire in her house, saved the fire-tongs? What else do they salvage from the great fire of life

Inspiration & Quotes × Money, Work & Power

Hate this, but works are reflexive

Anytime a work of media becomes popular with some Type of Guy, public perception of the work shifts. The work is no longer mainly about whatever it's actually about. It's now mostly about the Type of Guy who is known to like it.

Any sufficiently high quality work will end up an attractor for some Type of Guy.
This leads to a tendency for works to end up defined more by the type of guy that happened to latch onto the work than any property of the work itself

It be like that sometimes

1858
Sept. 19: Decided that one must love and work, and that's it.
Sept. 20: Tired. Didn't love and didn't work.
Leo Tolstoy

Misc

Those salaries are insane

Open this Letter

On 8/13/26

Public · Design & Objects

Open full size

Really destroys your impulsivity and taste for risk

Open full size

Nah why they do that to my man

Open full size

1 sigma each

Open full size

Gotta have good opsec

Open full size

Maybe we let it go

Open full size

Narrative validation

Open full size

Are people okay in the uk

Twitter algo weights

Real asf

Image.png

Inspiration & Quotes × People & Society

I support women, I’m like a human bra

Cannot help myself but push or get out the way completely

It’s so interesting when someone is so close to getting it but they really don’t get it and you have the moral dilemma of whether or not to try to push them over the edge

Misc

Not everybody likes me but not everybody matters

They have ELO for poker, let get ittt

It’s something of a miracle that graspingness is not causative to greatness

All things look invincible at their zenith
All things look unlikely at the foothills

Those salaries are insane

Open this Letter

On 8/12/26

Public · Design & Objects

I need a signed copy, don’t really agree much with his letter tho

Open full size

Military manual 1943 lmao

Open full size

Gang

Open full size

Focus on what you can affect and the amount of things you can affect naturally grow over time

Open full size

Crying

Open full size

I want everyone pushing betting platforms in gitmo

Open full size

Forever oscillating between these two

Open full size

My god

Open full size

Inspiration & Quotes × People & Society

Genius of every kind consists in perceiving objects more vividly and completely than other people do.
That is why we find in good authors something so lucid and illuminating, that we are immediately convinced by their ideas.

Accidents happen. That's what everyone says.
But in a quantum universe there are no such things as accidents, only possibilities and probabilities folded into existence by perception.

Never regret thy fall,
O Icarus of the fearless flight
For the greatest tragedy of them all
Is never to feel the burning light.

So, in short, a helpful strategy for becoming a magician: Surround yourself with people who look like magicians to you. Then imagine yourselt as one, older and wiser, in great detail. Imagine yourself as the person you would be afraid to say you want to be out loud to others (because it seems so ridiculously impossible right now. Write it down in great clarity and detail, then forget it. And let the part of your subconscious mind that still remembers lead you to becoming the things you want, and maybe, years later, check if it did.

Feels right, but also just knowing when you need to do what is 9/10s of the work

the challenge is that some people would benefit enormously from hesitating more, while others need to stop hesitating altogether
'move fast and break things' is great advice for one temperament and disastrous advice for another. your mileage may vary

Misc

If a bagel can have everything so can you!

Birds learn how to fall and fly at the same time

Lmfao my man shot his shot, literally

Open full size

Airport loungification has taken so much from us

Open full size

Stable is that step backwards between successful and failing

Open this Letter

On 8/11/26

Public · Design & Objects

Amazing

Open full size

Never doubt the American consumers will and ability to consume

Open full size

Monkee know, monkee do

Open full size

Art

Open full size

Onwards

Open full size

Public

All we need is a 25x of annual spend

Open full size

Italia looks so beautiful

Open full size

My god

Open full size

Shape · Inspiration & Quotes × AI & New Tech

Conclusions are cheap

“Why read books when the AI can just summarize them?"
The summary was never the point. Reading is a sustained encounter with another mind. 300 pages of someone's thinking pressed up against your thinking, for hours, over days.
A summary gives you the conclusions. But conclusions are cheap.
What's expensive & rare & precious is the shape of the thinking that got there. You cannot compress that, you can only sit with it.

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us

Time · Inspiration & Quotes × Money, Work & Power

Use it or lose it

Unused money devalues. Unused talent diminishes. Unused potential decays.
Unused machinery disintegrates. Unused time dies. Unused knowledge becomes a burden. What isn't used is abused. The tragedy of life isn't the ultimate death, but the resources that die within you when you are still alive. Use it, or you will lose it.

B-b-but I love looking in mirrors

There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.

People & Society

There’s a whole category of persons who interpret disagreements as personal attacks

Wish we’d stop romanticizing poverty

It sucks, and people succeed in spite of not because of

Open full size

Open this Letter

On 8/10/26

Public · Design & Objects

It’s only just begun

Gonna be bumpy, but net good and solid soon

Open full size

Much to think about

Open full size

Beautifully executed

Open full size

Break free

Open full size

Insane rates we do not have to stand for this shit what the fuck

Open full size

Lmfao

Open full size

Magazines are so back

Open full size

Inspiration & Quotes × Design & Objects

Isn't art always, to a certain extent, therapy for the artist?

Inspiration & Quotes × Money, Work & Power

Miss Joan Didion every day

I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it.
Not just to endure it, not just to sutter it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture.
To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it.
To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.

Misc

You maybe lost 1 year or 5, but you saved the rest of your life. Do not fall for the sunk costs fallacy. ONWARDS!

Worrying is like praying for something bad

The first 20 minutes of boredom are withdrawal symptoms what comes after that is something you haven't experienced since you were a child.

Open full size

Open this Letter

On 8/9/26

Public · Design & Objects

Lmao, find god

Never forget

Miss those days

Fucking discussing

Once I get my resting heart during sleep below 40 I’m throwing such a banger

Open full size

Inspiration & Quotes

When one generation tolerates a sin, the next generation will celebrate that sin, and then the generation after that won't know it's a sin anymore.

Interesting to think about

The father of seven has not finished a thought in four years. he is just moving. feeding. driving. wiping. his brain is soup and his back is finished and he has no opinions about civilization he is too tired for opinions. and meanwhile civilization is growing out of him like he is dirt and he doesnt even notice because there is milk on the floor again. the childfree man has read eleven books this year about the decline of the west and he is the decline and the books are the evidence and he will understand this at fifty eight in a room that is very clean and very quiet

Funny how that works

The more you become interested in opportunity…
The more opportunity becomes interested in you.

There’s a genie in your phone, you just need to figure out what ya want

the bottleneck is increasingly knowing what you want

Joy is a muscle you build by dancing when you're inclined to stay in bed.

Kafka, you always manage to find the words my guy

I never wish to be easily defined. I'd rather float over other people's minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.

AI & New Tech × Design & Objects

My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers.

The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person.
And if we really go back and we examine, you know, did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years out in the future what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it? Of course not.
Leonardo was the artist, but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. He knew about pigments, knew about human anatomy.
And combining all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, was what resulted in the exceptional result.
And there is no difference in our industry. The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.

Misc

Dandelion fountain

Open full size

Open this Letter

On 8/7/26

Become · Inspiration & Quotes

The soul troubles the Spaniard, and that's why he wants to die. Either he becomes a bandit—not to steal, to see if someone will kill him; or he becomes a saint—not to live a holy life, but to annihilate himself.

Will try my best

Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.

Cranberry juice has crazy tannins

Why does cranberry juice taste like it doesn’t want to be wet

Public · Design & Objects

Spanish lamp from 70s

Open full size

Ways to buy and sell time

Open full size

Constantly oscillating between these two

Open full size

Terafab— we need more of these !!!

Open full size

The put the bush shoe throwing on a ring. We live in the best times

Open full size

Jesus

Open full size

Lmao people are insane

Open full size

Uhmmm

Open full size

Try try again

Open full size

Love this

Open full size

Misc

Looks goooood

View post on X

You just don’t do that, wild disrespectful

Open full size

Open this Letter

On 8/5/26

Money, Work & Power

Copy right law is so interesting.

They included termination you have a 5 year window to get back your work incase you were young and dumb.

So they include this concept of Authorship as that can never be transferred, unlike ownership which can.

Public · Design & Objects

Open full size

Crying

Open full size

Explains so much

Open full size

‪Aspire to be the blue sheep day in and day out ‬

Open full size

A meme is compressed philosophy

Open full size

Development · Inspiration & Quotes × People & Society

Wilhelm Reich on staying sane in an insane world

Keep one's life financially independent.

Continue unabated to exercise one's power of creativity in concrete, strenuous tasks, always seeking perfection as near as possible.

Carefully cherish LOVE of a partner with full gratification, of the total emotional being if possible, of the body in a clean way if necessary.

Keep out of the trap of confusion by the average man and woman, helping others to keep out of the trap too as best they can.

Keep one's structure clean like brook water through knowing and correcting every mistake, making the corrected mistake the guiding lines to new truth.

Never yield to the expediencies of life except where it is basically harmless or where the main line of development is not impeded for the duration of one's life.

The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense - he is "collective man," a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind.

People really do not understand focal lengths and can lead to wild dysmorphia.

Doubt it was ill intended for The mass replacement ™️ odds are just an unintended consequence of tech and the people working on it, this is exactly why there must be more local development and assimilation of the tech!!

Why the ai arms race is crucial. Technology, like everything else, takes shape of the creator so either you create it or pay the price in weird ways you can’t even begin to fathom

One of my firm beliefs is that the spread of the front-facing camera, designed in Asia to flatter Asian facial features, is responsible for the massive wave of disastrous facial treatments being undertaken by women and increasingly men in the West. We're seeing a kind of mass psychosis— a fracturing of the self— caused by a camera device that by design distorts the facial features of European people.

Inspiration & Quotes

😞

She always told me that truth and beauty were ultimately the same thing, and that one day I would understand that.

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/08/in-memory-of-my-wife-elise-cawley-1961-2026-with-thanks-for-36-wonderful-years/

Misc

BREAKING NEWS
They’re making a day when things are better, they’re calling it tomorrow

The universe isn’t on a budget

Ask for it all, and then some

Open this Letter

On 8/4/26

Everyone · Inspiration & Quotes

Mr. Gorbachev tear down all but the ONE wall!

people go around with all these walls in their mind to stop inappropriate thoughts whereas i just have ONE good wall between thought and action and as long as that's solid i can think whatever the Fuck i want

A good traveler has no fixed plans,
and is not intent on arriving.

Honestly, often the case

I didn't learn anything. I already knew I wasn't supposed to do that

Open full size

IT’S BEEN LIKE THAT FOR A MINUTE HEDI SLIMANE

Everyone knows adidas ate a €1 billion loss on Yeezy inventory
BUT Only Yeezy impairment ever disclosed: €12 million.
They sold their inventory stock for ~€1.4B across 2023-24 and booked ~€500M of operating profit.

Choose your beliefs wisely

Your brain is a lawyer, not a judge—it argues for what you already believe, not what’s true.

You cannot feel guilty, there’s no end to it. You can do all you can to help give everyone equal opportunities, but feeling guilty is not going to help you nor them

If we were to eliminate every unearned advantage in life, we should start with parents who read bedtime stories to their children

Public · Design & Objects

Just keep moving directionally, it will compound

Open full size

Whodathunkit

Open full size

Bell curve
Open full size

Sometimes I get emotional about fonts

Open full size

Many places actually, send their docs in training to torn places, cause what liability

Open full size

Simple, really

Open full size

Whodathunkit

Can predict someone’s thoughts on taxes by their contribution

Open full size

No way, I’m sweating out my eyes right now what the fuck 😭😭😭‬

Open full size

Watch your step

Open full size

More of this

Open full size

AI & New Tech

I’m no longer asking ChatGPT, I’m conjuring spirits for the Truth

Misc

Agency? Oh you mean The Triumph of Will

Treat your imagination like prophecy instead of fantasy

Open this Letter

On 8/3/26

People & Society × Inspiration & Quotes

This actually the inverse of the toughness of the field
Von Neumann said it best

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

Open full size

There’s this tendency to underestimate how much govt would prefer to just know than a quick enforcement that just sends stuff underground ‬

They’re hoping that more criminals and terrorists use crypto and use blockchains because there's a trail.

The alternative is the hawala system... Two cousins in two countries, money never actually moves, one just tells the other the family has it. No digital trail whatsoever, because nothing has happened digitally. No paper trail, no nothing.

People wave off stuff like tarot, horoscope, superstitions etc but they’re net-beneficial as they're structured version of introspection

‪Wish more people would realize this and stop pussyfooting around & turn to building something grand ‬

“Lean Startups” were always about making startups inner metrics legible to investors at the cost of their customers.

Perception is very underrated and a very complicated game. But rests on the foundation of the inner self

It's almost mind-blowing how important status is. Most people will never see past your perceived status and their reactions will be 100% dependent on your perceived status
People will gang up viciously on a non-conforming person of "Low-status" to coerce them into conformity despite their having harmed no one, but struggle to bring that same energy to those in some kind of power doing far worse things that harm many.

People who can't face their problems want to make their problems your problems.
Jung put it well:

Anything repressed will be projected onto others.

You have to give fuck about something

As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.

People with similar autistic traits seem to connect on their own social wavelength.

Their brains synchronized during conversation in distinct patterns depending on whether they were paired with someone who shared similar autistic traits.

https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223(25)01305-8/abstract

Open full size

Source: sciencedirect.com

AI & New Tech × Money, Work & Power

We must spend time "consciousness raising". The bottleneck is our own Pride and small thinking. We need to think beyond our primitive desires and beyond even our own brief lives. We are not yet ready for the power and potential that Artificial Intelligence offers. This will require reacquainting ourselves with moral conceptions in a whole of society approach to improving awareness.

Public · Design & Objects

Cognitive vulnerability

Open full size

A terrible trade, never give in

Open full size

Lines as 3rd spaces is insane

Open full size

3d printer needed expeditiously

Open full size

Faster and faster

Open full size

The confidence losing it all imprints, may just be worth it

Open full size

There must be one

Open full size

Need to see if they took into account mingle child for second

Compared to second-born children, first-borns are at a greater risk of being diagnosed with a large number of conditions, from ADHD to autism.
Contrarily, second-borns are more likely to have documented substance abuse issues
Open full size
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44360-026-00177-z.pdf

Inspiration & Quotes

Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing.

Jesus, what a lens, explains a lot

The median voter in America is a Maoist. They do not believe in tradeoffs. They believe that, if only everyone were good and honest and working toward the right goals, good things will happen.

https://open.substack.com/pub/nicholasdecker/p/the-median-voter-is-a-maoist?r=36pad&utm_medium=ios

Can point to cases of this in our age endlessly

Mao does not often include details in his writing. His instructions are aphorisms – not “do this”, but “see that this is done”. And of course, there is a great gap between what the appropriate things to do were, and what outcomes they would actually lead to. If things lead to disaster, they can be disavowed as being a misunderstanding, and not showing the fundamental wrongness of the program.

Public

Looks like he achieved his true goal that night irregardless

Open full size

Be there in a shake

Brb

Open full size

Inspiration & Quotes × Memes & Culture

Beautifully put

I am in constant awe of our ability to create. it might be the most astonishing thing we were ever handed, and every single one of us is walking around with something inside us - just begging to be let out. you can arrange letters in an order that makes a stranger ache. you can pull music out of dead silence. you can build a product or tool that did not exist anywhere else until the moment you dragged it into being. I cannot get over how staggering that is. do not let it sit in you unused.

Science, Nature & The Future

Amazing
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10835-7.pdf

Misc

Sometimes you gotta play devils avocado

It’s really that simple

Destruction is just clearing the way for construction

Half rebel
Half healer

If this happens I’m buying and giving away 20 dozen nuggets

Open full size

The photographer went OFF
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/138-Amenia-Rd_Sharon_CT_06069_M34074-29533

Never coming down but can’t risk wasting those precious years, just in case

Open full size

Open this Letter

On 8/2/26

Stay · Inspiration & Quotes

Practicality is usually the case

Know why there are so many fewer clinical studies of LSD than other psychedelics (not talking ibogaine; that’s another issue)? Because it lasts so long and most lab employees just won’t/can’t stay that long. Seriously.

Jung said it best

Parents should always be conscious of the fact that they themselves are the principal cause of neurosis in their children … Children are driven unconsciously in a direction that is intended to compensate for everything that was left unfulfilled in the lives of their parents.

Cannot kill this spirit, otherworldly things do not die

I will live, even if life betrays me and I will dream, even if dreams abandon me.

I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.

You're probably underestimating your ability to innovate and your capacity for enduring hardship.

When potatoes were first discovered/invented, there were 30+ varieties and all of them were toxic.
They needed to eat clay alongside the potatoes to bind the toxins.

Public · Design & Objects

Can’t expect to get away without a scrape or cut

Probably nothing!

A/W 4004 BC

Carpe diem

Lmfaooo

Contingency plan, but once decisions been made, fly off the blocks and keep the blinders on

Open full size

Nightmares

Open full size

Where the Atlantic and Pacific meet

Open full size

Etymology is so fun

Open full size

People & Society × Inspiration & Quotes

This was quite obvious when you’d dig into the people that were pushing the "it fades" trope.
Yeah it fades for YOU.
Like everything else YOU have ever gotten involved in.
GO HOME

https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsq092

People become so myopic with their spreadsheets and forget the fact there are things that cannot be measured. They never show up on a balance sheet, and when they go you’ll never quite know

ICYMI Alpha Zero did reinvent the best chess openings. Had no access to human games.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815

People really forget how much intrinsic respect for our fellow man we have. All downstream of:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.
Open full size

Tragedy is simple, but comedy is complex because it touches human life in far more places than tragedy.

People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter...like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice

WRT appetite bounce back post glps

The doctors behind this research are misunderstanding "appetite" measures.

When people report that their appetite is back, but they nevertheless continue eating less only when they're on the drug, that means the meaning of the measure has changed.

Appetite_T1 != Appetite_T2

AI & New Tech × People & Society

I have little sympathy for the mathematicians crying about ai compressing their identities. You were warned, your hubris led you to think you were doing something a machine could never.

Welcome to the real world, schools finished.

I trust most of them will be fine, even if they don’t know it yet but not tolerating the crying.

Check the proof the machine spit out in the mean time, thank you

Misc

They want you caught up in the distraction, fear, and doubt

It’s right there.
Go for it.

Open full size

Chaorderly, new favorite wombo

Game theory explains why recovery attempts frequently do more damage than the original downfall.

Your instinct will always be to erase the mistake in one fell swoop: the one genius move that puts everything back tonight.

This feels like ambition and decisiveness, yet it's deeply insidious. Almost every game worth being in is "iterated," which means that it consists of various rounds that impact each other. Recovery is usually reserved for later rounds, not this one. The "last gamble" has the drawback that failing it increases the danger of being totally eliminated. So, this last act gambles away the only thing that makes recovery even possible.
This is akin to amputating an arm to treat an infected finger. Stop the bleeding first, then plan afterward. Fix your losses in the next round, not this one.

Two approaches to life

reshape yourself to fit it and
force it to accommodate you

Open this Letter

On 8/1/26

People & Society × Inspiration & Quotes

People really love giving unsolicited advice for situations they’d never be in

YOU would do 4% annually, that’s why YOU would never get there.

Open full size

... there is a fate worse than death / and its living to hear eulogies / for the person you could have been

How much of life is just people living vicariously through others

People want to hear songs with the words they're afraid to say.

Nic Cage's comeback is what the world needed.

We must make an effort to be more understanding and forgiving to our fellow man

If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice
and violence we inflict upon our own natures.

James Baldwin, 1963

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

AI & New Tech × Science, Nature & The Future

Honestly knowing there’s better models inside really is the best recruiting tool cause if I could just get access to a lil bit for side projects I’d put my time in

https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/

Public

“You’re either alive or dead”

Open full size

Until death all defeat is psychological

Open full size

Public · Design & Objects

Should’ve done the cheap Japan trips when we had the chance

Open full size

Minimalism must go, maximalismmaxxing trinkets galore

Open full size

The net good for all will far outweigh the weirdness

Open full size

Next time ac is out

Open full size

Chat this true

Open full size

Sometimes you gotta check in on yaself

Hard

💃🕺

Cooking

Yeah, sure, in theory, but China doesn't care about textbooks and theory

Open full size

Issey

Open full size

Would bet on this

Open full size

Maintain the memory of a goldfish

Open full size

No, it’s not. Your math is just wrong.

Open full size

People do not understand the scale Meta works at. Narrative has been far removed from reality, it will pay off, soon

Open full size

Wrong.
The slop will continue to be refined until it’s no longer differentiable

Open full size

GOAT became a word the year the goat arrived.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/time-traveler/1996
Open full size

Adapt or lose

Open full size

Everyone says “follow the money” until it’s time to actually parse through the money and then it’s just easier to cry incompetence.

God forbid you have to dig further than a layer or two

Open full size

Flag of United States Fish and Wildlife Service (1949-1989)

Open full size

Happy birthday to the southern hemisphere horses

Open full size

What a happy family

Open full size

Sometimes you have have the wrong lens on the situation and should step away and come back to it

Open full size

All · Inspiration & Quotes

It's simple, but not easy.

For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.

Remember what it's all for

No good thing is pleasant to possess, without friends to share it.

"For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn."

Until death, all defeat is psychological

Although it might be difficult right now, you have made it through difficult times before. You will make it through this, too

Never retard expressing yourself for the sake of how it'll be viewed by others

Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.

Memes & Culture × Design & Objects

Ye contracts wild, he really took on so much out of pocket and liability for the sake of getting the art out how he wanted.

Worth it

https://medium.com/discourse/kanyes-contracts-reveal-dark-truths-about-the-music-industry-956418641df2

Memes & Culture

One of the most thoughtful interviews regarding the film(still haven’t seen it)

View post on X

Misc

significant crystallized -> fluid, and no proof cartels theory of significant fluid -> crystallized

Open full size

Something in you narrates, and something else witnesses the narration

My alone time is for everyone else's safety

Re: JPY, weakening dollar, rotation has already begun. Plan accordingly

Open this Letter

On 7/31/26

People & Society

On Leopold. People love to build you up to tear you down. He'll be back. Swimming with the sharks you can't expect to not get bit.

Harpy Eagle is the most powerful Eagle in the world. It’s wingspan can get up to 7.5 feet.

KAW

Open full size

Pdf

PDF.png

Open full size

PDF.png

Open full size

Png · Design & Objects

An idea is born fragile, you need to protect it, as if you would a new born child. Until it’s capable of being something that can stand on its own.

Open full size

Crying

Open full size

This is how you teach life lessons

You gotta go above and beyond

Open full size

Mona Lisa. We should wonder art sounds like

Open full size

We’d never have built modernity if stuff was as captured by doomers and regulators today

Open full size

Image-1.png

Open full size

Onwards

Open full size

It’s important to remember what a thing is there for. Not the stated wishful thinking but boots on the ground take

Open full size

Just do it

Open full size

Panels and breakout sessions, so real

Open full size

Could be as low as $10.
He’d beat the shit out of me if he saw me say no and leave $ on the table

Open full size

A/C really is the backbone of civilization

Open full size

Science, Nature & The Future

New camera tek, cannot even fathom how bright the future will be !

Open full size

Misc

The four mahābhūtā of mind:

Earth supplies resistance that anchors.
Water binds while allowing flow.
Air opens the clearing for nearness and farness, approach and withdrawal.
Fire sparks change and intensification.

Open full size

“Abracadabra” is Aramaic: “avra kehdabra,”
I create as I speak.

You cast spells with your speech

Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will rule our life and we’ll call it fate

Fuck the jones act. All my homies hate the jones act

Open full size

A gardener is a futurist

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another."

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

The Soul is repository of information that we gather during a lifetime.

Twins

Open full size

Ivy wolk is a national treasure

Open full size

Open this Letter

Jolts

9/15/268 Jolts

Psychologists distinguish between two forms of intelligence: fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence.

Fluid intelligence is your ability to process information quickly and solve novel problems you haven’t encountered before.

Crystallized intelligence is the knowledge you have accumulated over time, and your ability to use that knowledge.

These two forms of intelligence develop differently across your lifespan.

Fluid intelligence tends to decline as you get older. Crystallized intelligence tends to increase, because you continue accumulating knowledge and experience over time.

Formal education is useful for increasing crystallized intelligence. You learn more facts, concepts, vocabulary, and ways of thinking about the world.

Fluid intelligence, though, is much harder to change.

Open full size

my life's philosophy is that I will meet the person I could have been at the end of my life, and my goal is to reduce the difference between him and me to as little as possible

😬

have you considered that your over thinking is masking your under feeling

People too much taken up with little things usually become incapable of big ones

Current models are getting close to PhD-level intelligence. After that, they're expected to achieve the intelligence of someone who decided not to do a PhD.

Whodathunkit
Open full size

Show my the incentives I’ll show you the outcomes

Open full size

9/14/263 Jolts

It is frequently the case that although we lack direct measurements of some variable, with a little ingenuity we can come up with another one that could serve as a proxy for the variable of interest.

A step backward after making a wrong turn is a step in the right direction

Explains stuff much more cleanly than just “social media use” although I’m guessing bit of that is captured here

Open full size

9/13/2614 Jolts

What is to give light must endure the burning

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Crystallizing public opinion

For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.

Trying again is an act of rebellion

Never trying again is an act of submission

The Abbasid caliphs had set the model for public debates on religion.
At one held at the caliphal court in the 830s, a Mutazila scholar took on an intimidated representative of the embattled Sunnis on the issue of whether man brings about his own actions (the Mutazila stance) or whether God does (the Sunni one). When the Sunni let his arm dangle at the elbow and asked, 'Who is moving this?" - he expected the answer to be God - the Mutazila responded, 'Someone whose mother is a whore?
The caliph approved.

“Do you believe in free will?”

Of course, what choice do I have?

Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.

One of the sources of unhappiness, fatigue, and nervous strain is inability to be interested in anything that is not of practical importance in one's own life. The result of this is that the conscious mind gets no rest from a certain small number of matters, each of which probably involves some anxiety and some element of worry.
The world is vast and our own powers are limited. If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. And to demand too much is the surest way of getting even less than is possible. The man who can forget his worries by means of a genuine interest in, say, the Council of Trent, or the life history of stars, will find that, when he returns from his excursion into the impersonal world, he has acquired a poise and calm which enable him to deal with his worries in the best way, and he will in the meantime have experienced a genuine even if temporary happiness.

Clown is trying to run for sure

Open full size

You can only properly serve one customer, the kids or the teachers. The schooling system seems to have made a decision

Open full size

"This Is Not a Phase" wedding veil by Holly Winter Couture, with metallic silver and ivory embroidery of the lunar cycle along the bottom edge

Open full size

Once the subconscious mind accepts an idea, it begins to execute it. It's an interesting subtle truth that the law of the subconscious mind works for good and bad ideas alike.

The law of life is the law of belief. A belief is a thought in your mind. Do not believe in things to harm or hurt you. Believe in the power of your subconscious to heal, inspire, strengthen, and prosper you. According to your belief it is done unto you

Every thought is a cause, every condition an effect

9/12/268 Jolts

Real

Open full size

Susan Sontag put it beautifully

mad people = people who stand alone + burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same

Open full size

Enkoimesis: practice centered around sacred sleep, where people sought answers, remedies, or healing instructions through dreams.

Yeah that’s fucked I’m crying

Open full size

Elementary principle of decision-making: always do irreversible decisions last.

A “sense of a foreshortened future”
versus the sense that “all is possible”

Open full size

9/11/263 Jolts

what tolerating anti-social behavior does to our public spaces:

"It’s a primary reason why we shy away from dense walkable spaces and instead move towards suburban sprawl.

People in the U.S. don’t respect, trust, or want to be around other random citizens, out of fear and disgust.

The U.S. is on the wrong side of it.

Simply put, nobody wants to be accosted by a stranger, no matter how infrequent, and until that risk is close to nil, people will continue edging towards isolated living.

Our culture often confuses us by making us believe that stress and pressure are inherently bad...boredom is the greatest danger..Do not fall for this mentality of ease and comfort; we are actually tough creatures built to learn from and adapt to pressure

We are such hypocrites that we view another person's suffering as punishment for their sins, yet regard our own suffering as a test!

9/10/2612 Jolts

That’s true

Open full size

Everything’s the same

The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn't separate from the rest of your existence.
If you're a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren't working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh?
It all goes together.

Damn

Open full size

Real

Open full size

The onus is on us

The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. "Live," Nietzsche says, "as though the day were here." It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal —carries the cross of the redeemer not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.

Beautiful

Open full size

You never know what worst luck your bad luck saved you from

Open full size

There are a ton of fundamental bugs in the Human Operating System...The higher you stick out, the more people want to chop you down.

This is our edge. The most dynamic place in the world

Open full size

Poverty humiliates men even to the extent of making them blush for their virtues

You’re never too old to restart

i wonder how often people in the 2020s use the opportunity afforded by a crisis- a messy divorce, a big career embarrassment- to start a totally new life somewhere else. by definition we wouldn't hear from them. we hear instead from people who crash out, and overindex on those

You have always disliked authority because every fibre of your being knows you have enough talent to build a life on your own terms.

By deferring to the earthy authority of men, you are forfeiting ownership over a part of your soul in exchange for answers, direction, and recognition.

9/9/265 Jolts

The rise of nonchalance is the death of passion. Chalanting only

Horizontal relationships: relationships based not on hierarchy but on recognizing mutual equality or, at least, equivalence

Kierkegaard really was that guy

Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion - and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion... while truth again reverts to a new minority.

Agency, is emergent from a evolutionary pressure of death

You must get up and move

Open full size

9/8/265 Jolts

"The things you tolerate set the standard for your life." - Scott Clary

Think about the things you are "tolerating" in your life and work, and how much different it might be if you didn't.

You are not stuck. There are so many incredible opportunities to level things up.

Yeah throw $ at it is possible

Open full size

There will never be a “right time”

There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.

Populations are not static. People fail to get the dynamics of change between elections. Every large election brings ~4% fewer older voters and 5.5% additional young voters. And we know where different age groups stand wrt some issues.

Even a soul submerged in sleep
is hard at work and helps
make something of the world.

9/7/2611 Jolts

The translated from Chinese instead of simplified Chinese is the real insight here, he’s talking directly to Taiwan

Open full size

A must read
https://open.substack.com/pub/edwest/p/doomscrolling-ourselves-to-death?r=36pad&utm_medium=ios

Open full size

The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities. The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do. The lover who never risks loving mocks romance. The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself. And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live.

To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralized nation tells demoralized stories to itself.

It's not winter that defeats you. It is your insistence on summer

Hiphop would be full blown corporate CIA drug dealer gang poison music if it wasn’t for Ye

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.

Giving my clankers the day off for Labor Day

Fear is the cheapest seat in the house, I’d like to see you living in better conditions

You don’t hate journos enough

Open full size

Everyone’s terrified, convinced the studios don’t need artists anymore. It’s the artist that doesn’t need the studios.

View post on X

9/6/264 Jolts

Hands occupied by blessings can hold grudges

Never cared never will

Open full size

You will serve something, choose wisely

I think I'm ready to go back to church.
I haven't found Jesus yet, but I've seen enough of Satan.

This type of engine doesn’t run off of greed

9/5/268 Jolts

Lmfao b like that

Open full size

Every time

Open full size

What’s more important, the journey or destination?

The company

Looks maxxing is a great primer for transhumanism and I think we're underrating how useful it will be in ushering that new era in.

Praying to the Greek Goddess of memory (Mnemosyne) about the problem (dementia)

That’s gotta hurt

View post on X

Martyr? I thought you said murder.

Oh well, okay. Never mind then, I'm busy

Open full size

9/4/2610 Jolts

Napoleon was exiled and ended up using that energy to level Elba up. Energy is a choice

In his 300 days as Elba's ruler, Napoleon ordered and oversaw massive infrastructure improvements: building roads and draining marshes, boosting agriculture and developing mines, as well as overhauling the island's schools and its entire legal system.

Would never want to switch with anyone honestly

anyhumanever.com

V timely

These patients present an unusual degree of self-reference in their interactions with other people, a great need to be loved and admired by others, and a curious apparent contradiction between a very inflated concept of themselves and an inordinate need for tribute from others. Their emotional life is shallow.

They experience little empathy for the feelings of others, they obtain very little enjoyment from life other than from the tributes they receive from others or from their own grandiose Fantasies, and they feel restless and bored when external glitter wears off and no new sources feed their self-regard. They envy others, tend to idealize some people from whom they expect narcissistic supplies, and to depreciate and treat with contempt those from whom they do not expect anything (often their former idols). In general, their relationships with other people are clearly exploitative and sometimes parasitic. It is as if they feel they have the right to control and possess others and to exploit them without guilt feelings-and behind a surface which very often is charming and engaging, one senses coldness and ruthlessness. Very often such patients are considered to be "dependent" because they need so much tribute and adoration from others, but on a deeper level they are completely unable really to depend on anybody because of their deep distrust and depreciation of others.

P accurate, but there is evil going to turkey to hide their true nature

The hairline index never misses: the purer a man’s heart is, the better his hairline

People will be in Hell thinking they’re in heaven and tell you that you need to do what they do to get into heaven

Sisyphean

Open full size

The gap between who you are and who you’re becoming isn’t distance, time, or circumstances. It’s simply frequency, which can shift in an instant. A quantum jump, not journey. A tuning.

What you don't understand could fill libraries.

God save me from my friends, for from my enemies, I can save myself.

If goofing around is a crime, I am a felon

Open full size

9/3/2611 Jolts

Churchill spitting

You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.

I prefer September. It is more feminine, more subtle, more mysterious. It resembles a spring seen in a dream.

Preach

Impatience is such a great trait...it doesn't get enough credit.
Patience is solid for long-term vision & compounding results...but impatience & push make it possible to get there.
Patience gets all the credit.
Impatience does all the work.

If everything around you is falling apart, you always start by looking in the mirror first. That’s a common denominator

The real nineteenth century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.

Tasting menus

Open full size

As social conditions and opportunities improve, social frustration grows more quickly.

You’re just scared, like a rookie. You’re like a kid at a talent show with a number pinned to your shirt.

You’ve got nothing or you would’ve shown me by now.

So get out, thank you, have a nice day

This is not a decision made for the benefit of children.
Why? If it were, they would be aggressively testing AI tutoring and measuring the results.

This is a political choice made for the teachers, the union would never let ai relegate them to what they truly are: glorified babysitters

Time and time again, research has shown that the best way to improve learning is personalized 1:1 tutoring

AI is the first technology that gives every kid the best world-class tutor specifically personalized to them

NYC bans it

MBA consensus is the funniest inverse indicator

Funny that everyone who wanted to make money in the mid 2000s learned to speak Chinese and everyone who wanted to do international development learned Arabic

9/2/267 Jolts

Insurance terms that go hard:

Moral Hazard
Winner’s Curse
Adverse Selection
Pure Premium
Subrogation
Concurrent Causation
Utmost Good Faith
Fortuitous Loss
Force Majeure
Acts of God

The duality of man

On August 10, 1897, Felix Hoffmann, a chemist with the Bayer Company, synthesized acetylsalicylic acid from willow bark; it went on sale as Aspirin and conquered the globe. Eleven days later the same man invented another substance that was also to become world famous: diacetyl morphine, a derivative of morphine-the first designer drug. Trademarked as Heroin, it entered the market and began its own campaign. "Heroin is a fine business,"

Beliefs as a medium instead of monuments

Capitalism has more often than not been declared the culprit in this historical destruction of communities...the truth is, the political state, by its incessant centralization and bureaucratization of power, has done far more...to effect this destruction

At the extreme end, in some species, high-status females can actually prevent other females from reproducing altogether. They do this by stressing lower-status females so badly that they cease ovulating. Failing that, a high-status mother might kill another mother's baby or even physically expel the woman entirely from the social group.

Rip

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.
He went flying down the river in his boat with his video camera to his eye, making a moving picture of the moving river upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly toward the end of his vacation. He showed his vacation to his camera, which pictured it, preserving it forever: the river, the trees, the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat behind which he stood with his camera preserving his vacation even as he was having it so that after he had had it he would still have it. It would be there. With a flick of a switch, there it would be. But he would not be in it. He would never be in it.

Open full size

9/1/265 Jolts

It's hard to recognize that your whole being, your soul doesn't move at the speed of your cognition. That it could take you a year to really know something that you intellectually believe in a second.

Open full size

Prob the only banger Freud had

We have long observed that every neurosis has the effect, and so probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from reality.

Rising reports of suicidal behaviors in children and adolescents have led to the recognition of a youth mental health crisis. However, reported rates can be influenced by access to screening and changes in reporting conventions, as well as by changes in social stigma. Using data on all hospital visits in New Jersey from 2008-2019, we investigate two inflection points in adolescent suicide-related visits and show that a rise in 2012 followed changes in screening recommendations, while a sharp rise in 2016-2017 followed changes in the coding of suicidal ideation. Rates of other suicidal behaviors including self-harm, attempted suicides, and completed suicides were essentially flat over this period. These results suggest that underlying suicide-related behaviors among children, while alarmingly high, may not have risen as sharply as reported rates suggest. Hence, researchers should approach reported trends cautiously.

Speed turns the point into a line

8/31/2611 Jolts

It is important to clarify that optimism is not the same as hope. Hope is an emotional state most closely related to wishing for important - but less likely - outcomes that are more out of our control. Optimists go further in that they believe outcomes will be better and so work harder, longer and persevere when pessimists give up.

You are what you are

Every man is born with qualities he can't ever change. Trying to fix them actually worsens his condition
Doesn't matter if you like the quality, or if other people do either. It's yours to utilize & embrace

The beauty you see everywhere is a mirror of what lives in you.

Cannot shield yourself, environment is too important

Open full size

Every Roman was surrounded by slaves. The slave and his psychology flooded ancient Italy, and every Roman became inwardly, and of course unwittingly, a slave. Because living constantly in the atmosphere of slaves, he became infected through the unconscious with their psychology. No one can shield himself from such an influence.

The paradox of the will centers on the problem of desire. I can very often will what I want (I am capable enough), but the wanting itself is not under my control. My desires are fickle and destructive, and once they take hold, they become impossible to resist. Attention, for Weil and for Murdoch, is a way of enlarging one's desire for good.
We find a focal point that appears to contain the good, we look at it, we wait, and over time, if we're patient, our will becomes aligned with it.

Cognitive dissonance is not a synonym for "hypocrisy." Hypocrisy is when someone's stated values and behavior conflict. Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable mental state that may occur when the person notices the conflict and actually cares that it exists. However, if the person doesn't care, or they've already resolved the conflict such that it doesn't bother them anymore, then there's no cognitive dissonance. Remember, cognitive dissonance is a state of discomfort. No discomfort means no cognitive dissonance,

The human condition doesn’t change? Whodathunkit

Open full size

He feigns hope in his face, and presses the pain deep in his heart

To extend one’s memory through deeds: this is the work of courage.

8/30/2613 Jolts

Only the pronoied survive

My new age friends call that state of being pronoia, the opposite of paranoia. Instead of believing everyone is out to get you, you believe everyone is out to help you. Strangers are working behind your back to keep you going, prop you up, and get you on your path. The story of your life becomes one huge elaborate conspiracy to lift you up. But to be helped you have to join the conspiracy yourself; you have to accept the gifts.

The fastest way to kill something special is to compare it to something else.

Helping one person might not change the world, but it will change the world for that person. Therefore it’s important to do

The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving.

Some of you need real problems. Your mind’s conjuring nonsense because it’s bored

Overwork, curiosity and sympathy—our modern vices.

Working is the best and most productive escape. If you can wield it wisely

Overworking is a modern vice. You get lost in a thousand little things that don't matter so you have an excuse to avoid the 2-3 big things that are heavy, difficult, and important. Work becomes a tool not for power, or even happiness, but evasion...

Perhaps spirituality is simply returning to what we were as children—honest, curious, unafraid to be exactly who we are.

Being knighted feels like it’d be a bit annoying. Like you couldn’t have done it on your own you needed to be in their good graces in order to do what you do.

Trust = Knowledge + Intention

This is why we must keep making shit up, the people are no longer visualizing metaphors that are embedded in language, directly correlated with loss of whimsy imo

Language goes stale incredibly quickly. A metaphor works, everyone uses it, and eventually we stop having to construct anything at all.

The man that waits for the perfect shot will die with a full magazine

8/29/264 Jolts

Attention is prophecy. Where you direct it determines what kind of world you perceive, and what kind of self you become. This is why belief matters, because an active lens through which the world is rendered. The more you attend to something, the more real it becomes.

Open full size

Ambition, like all disordered passions, is a violent and unthinking delirium. ... Like a fire fed by a pitiless wind, it only burns out after having consumed everything in its path.

It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we must do what is required.

8/28/2613 Jolts

There is nothing worse on this earth than the critic who lives to condemn whatever emerges, to capture whatever escapes their frame and discipline any free new passion

When peoples joys are too great, we respond with envy. If others sorrows are too small we don't take them seriously. Thus: we are prone to sympathize with other peoples small joys and great sorrows.

https://aipolcom.net/
Color me shocked when technology takes political preferences of the creators

If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.

You would give up your dreams in order to escape your nightmares and I would not.
I think it's a bad bargain.

A lot of tech industry personality behaviors are simply a reflection of people not being confident and happy about themselves. Lot of high school, college, and young adult stuff playing out much later and more visibly for many who skipped various of those social stages.

If you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.

Some days this is exactly what you need

Open full size

If you just did something like go to the supermarket and experienced it fully without the goggles of habit and categories you would go crazy with pure sense and joy.

Premium mediocre, airport loungification I hate these people

Open full size

You have the right to action alone, but never to its fruits.

8/27/268 Jolts

Teach him the value of hard work. Then give him everything he wants for no reason.

It’s insane really

Open full size

If you not playing tennis those shits are sneakers

Open full size

The ability to discern discomfort or pain is an important skill to master

Need 10 https://pollen-robotics.com/microduck/

New mnemonic for Great Lakes : SHAME

Like all men, he was simply given bad times in which to live.

Premium mediocre is perfect

Open full size

8/26/265 Jolts

Open full size

People who say it cannot be done, should not interrupt those who are doing it.

Let it offend you that someone else could be handed your days and turn them into something greater.

Open full size

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

8/25/2611 Jolts

Such a lovely woman

Open full size

Maybe this has been the core belief of procrastination all along

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

Curiosity is the sauce

Open full size

Druck preaching

There's a reason I moved from an English major to being an economics major. I'm not embarrassed by it. I write everything using Al now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems. I don't know why this is relevant. My name is on the piece. It's my message.

Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific
fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth.

One must never despair upon losing something, whether it is an individual or an experience of joy or happiness; everything returns even more magnificently. What has to decline, declines; what belongs to us, stays with us, for everything works according to laws that are greater than our capacity for understanding and that only seem to contradict us. You have to live within yourself and think of all of life, all of its millions of possibilities, openings, and futures in relation to which there exists nothing that is past or has been lost.

No, you’re not perfect, but you’re not your mistakes

Rich and poor are feelings, not numbers

Hemingway put it best

No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow caretul.

Ineffable ≠ Not Real

Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man.
You take a step towards him, he takes a step back.
Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man.

8/24/268 Jolts

We are like chameleons, we take our hue and the color of our moral character, from those who are around us.

Human relations are an unending exercise in mutual imitation — the essence of which is perfectly captured by a not wholly transparent word, ‘reciprocity.’ A relationship may be benevolent and peaceable, or it may be malicious and belligerent. In either case, curiously, it does not cease to be reciprocal. This is very important [in understanding] imitation, whose role is everywhere and always [underestimated].

It's very easy to turn a good reciprocal relation into a bad reciprocal relation, but it's very difficult to turn back a bad reciprocal relation into a good one — very, very difficult — and that's the problem of mankind.

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.

Most problems dissolve at walking speed

Edmund Burke, against Locke's idea that darkness is not naturally an idea of terror:

'[I]n utter darkness, it is impossible to know in what degree of safety we stand; we are ignorant of the objects that surround us; we may every moment strike against some dangerous obstruction; we may fall down a precipice the first step we take; and if an enemy approach, we know not in what quarter to defend ourselves; in such a case strength is no sure protection; wisdom can only act by guess; the boldest are staggered, and he who would pray for nothing else towards his defence, is forced to pray for light.'

8/23/2629 Jolts

We don’t negotiate with therapists

Once I went to see a psychiatrist. I was doing something that had become a pattern that I kept repeating in life, and I thought: "Well, I should talk to a psychiatrist." When I entered the office, I asked him: "Do you think this process could affect my creativity in any way?" And the psychiatrist answered me: "Well, David, I have to be honest with you: it could." I shook his hand and left.

Open full size

Meow Fuji

Open full size

Schopenhauer knew my pain

I am now so old that young girls call me 'sir' without lying. The final cruelty of time.

You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return.

Open full size

Camus, you never lied

There is nothing more rebellious than finding joy in something that's supposed to be our punishment.

Real one

Open full size

Clark's Law:
As production costs near zero, the value of creativity approaches infinity.

Greek word σχολή from which we get “scholar” means “leisure” or “free time”

The way to acquire esoteric knowledge is by following your curiosity wherever it leads,

There is a Japanese practice of owning one very good version of something rather than several adequate ones.

One knife, kept sharp. One pen that writes exactly as you want. One bag chosen carefully and used for years.

This is not minimalism as aesthetic. This is minimalism as relationship.

You learn the object. You know its weight. You know how it responds to your hand.

The object becomes, over time, an extension of you.

That cannot happen with things you do not stay with long enough to know.

Nature doesn’t punish or reward. It’s indifferent

Nature does not punish the evil, it punishes the weak.

There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

The king himself rode a horse and shot arrows at a deer. However, the horse stumbled, causing him to fall off, but he was not injured. Looking around, he said, "Do not let the historians know about this. "

Intuition is the river of purpose flowing through you and unconsciousness is a dam

Flow is the sacred dance of surrender and trust

You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.

But people want meth so we will continue

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12728042

A plans an excuse for not living today

This duality can be pursued further and is related to a duality between past and future and the notions of control and knowledge. Thus we may have knowledge of the past but cannot control it; we may control the future but have no knowledge of it.

You were whole before the carving began.

There are many paths to enlightenment. Be sure to take the one with a heart.

The cosmic joke will continue until laughing at yourself improves

Optimism bias (also called unrealistic optimism) is the widespread tendency for people to overestimate the likelihood of positive personal outcomes and underestimate the likelihood of negative ones, relative to objective probabilities or relative to other people.

It is one of the most consistent and robust cognitive biases documented in psychology and behavioral economics. It appears in roughly 80% of the population and is notably reduced or absent in people with clinical depression.

Leave behind that face of hatred, be good now, we were mistaken, we shall begin again.

IT IS NOT THE CRITIC WHO COUNTS; NOT THE MAN WHO POINTS OUT HOW THE STRONG MAN STUMBLES, OR WHERE THE DOER OF DEEDS COULD HAVE DONE THEM BETTER. THE CREDIT BELONGS TO THE MAN WHO IS ACTUALLY IN THE ARENA, WHOSE FACE IS MARRED BY DUST AND SWEAT AND BLOOD; WHO STRIVES VAL-IANTLY; WHO ERRS, WHO COMES SHORT AGAIN AND AGAIN, BECAUSE THERE IS NO EFFORT WITHOUT ERROR AND SHORTCOMING; BUT WHO DOES ACTUALLY STRIVE TO DO THE DEEDS; WHO KNOWS GREAT ENTHUSIASMS, THE GREAT DEVOTIONS; WHO SPENDS HIMSELF IN A WORTHY CAUSE; WHO AT THE BEST KNOWS IN THE END THE TRIUMPH OF HIGH ACHIEVEMENT, AND WHO AT THE WORST, IF HE FAILS, AT LEAST FAILS WHILE DARING GREATLY, SO THAT HIS PLACE SHALL NEVER BE WITH THOSE COLD AND TIMID SOULS WHO NEITHER KNOW VICTORY NOR DEFEAT

I'm doing badly, I'm doing well, whichever you prefer;

Open full size

8/22/269 Jolts

to respond to situations very flexibly;

to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances;

to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages; to recognize the relative importance of different elements of a
situation;

to find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them;

to draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which
may link them;

to synthesize new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them together in new ways;

to come up with ideas which are novel.

The scariest part of the advancements in aging is the increasing hold boomers have over governance and power

I love humanity

Open full size

The I can do whatever the fuck I want, you can’t fire me of haircuts

Open full size

You’re too young to be playing defense

Open full size

Everyone’s just winging it
Open full size

8/21/2621 Jolts

Why young children's heads are so big relative to their bodies: most energy resources are being diverted to the brain during the early years. The newborn brain...represents 10% of the infant's body weight, whereas the adult brain is about 2%

Ancient Roman roads used small white stones called cats' eyes that reflected moonlight, acting as street lighting. Made from marble or limestone, they improved visibility, guiding pedestrians, chariots, and soldiers at night in cities like Pompeii.

It’s really that easy

Open full size

Stress

Open full size

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

I’ll take the job, but I want to be paid in poems

You can also see these in real life if you squint

Open full size

Congratulations! You’ve made it to the next level. Your next opponent is you

Open full size

No use crying over

Open full size

ME: Good morn—

PHD: It’s “doctor.”

Open full size

I don't pay attention to the world ending.
It has ended for me many times
& began again in the morning.

People will be angry that the sky is blue

This is so real

Open full size

Our ancestors didn't call it Neurodivergent.
The Seer.
The Healer.
The One Who Knows.

The certain heart receives nothing. God walks past it like a field that has already been harvested there is nothing to plant into hard ground. The trembling heart the stupid, embarrassing one receives everything

You buried your joy beneath the weight of a single unanswered prayer, while a thousand answered ones lay at your feet.

You shall learn how salt is the taste of another man’s bread, and how hard is the way that goes up and down another man’s stairs.

The purpose of a system is what it does. There is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do

Origin of Oregan has been up for debate

Open full size

8/20/267 Jolts

Open full size

Five minutes after birth, they decide your name, religion, nationality, and sect.
And you spend the rest of your life defending what you did not choose.

Memes embed themselves into our personal and collective consciousness. cynical memes can become psychohazards just as easily as hopeful ones can restore a sense of possibility

Endless optionality is a trap

A lot of you are cheating yourselves out of so much genuine happiness by never committing to a single thing in your entire lives

The harder something gets, the more locked in you get

Be like that

He's like a boxer that needs to get hit before he gives you his full attention

Victorian-era mechanical fan-parasol

Open full size

8/19/2612 Jolts

You cannot fake the light in your eyes

In esoteric traditions, "depth in the eyes" is often treated as a sign that there is something behind the surface personality - a sense of inner life, consciousness, or presence that seems to look back at you.

Interesting
https://open.substack.com/pub/worksinprogress/p/daycare-barely-matters?r=36pad&utm_medium=ios

Open full size

In Dostoevsky’s novel “The Possessed,” it was the sons of rich boomers who were the most in love with socialism. Not the poor. The more things change, the more things stay the same

Olive oil is way too expensive, I know I can’t say why

Open full size

“My new old chair”

Open full size

Alignment is crucial

Open full size

Thank you for your attention to this matter el Sid, appreciate it

Open full size

Just a lil off kilter

Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.

Shitty food makes the difference on sleep inertia

There’s also another possibility: you’re describing sleep inertia. Normally yours sounds extremely low—you wake and immediately move. If something causes even modestly poorer sleep or causes you to wake from a deeper sleep stage, suddenly you’ll experience that “gravity” that other people commonly have in the morning. That doesn’t necessarily mean your actual energy reserves are low.

8/18/265 Jolts

Retrograding food is insane but I’m intrigued

Open full size

Intuition is memory from the future

The only man that can bring peace in the Middle East 😭

Open full size
Open full size

If they had just let frontier and spirit merge we could’ve avoided all of this. Also just fb marketplace levels of lowballing going on

Open full size

8/17/2610 Jolts

Evergreen

Open full size

Sleep is so important

Recordings of neural activity in rodents show that firing sequences recorded in assemblies of hippocampal place cells during waking behavior are replayed during slow-wave sleep, this coordination could be when recent memories end up becoming remote memories

Evergreen

AI will do to everyone what the Internet has been doing for 20 years, just more so: it'll make the smart people smarter, and the dumb people dumber. It'll empower those with agency, and turn the slothful into NPCs.

No amount of 'alignment' or policy will much change that.

Revolution is not a dinner party

A year after Mao had done away with his rivals there came the Great Terror, in which hundreds of thousands more perished according to killing quotas set by Mao himself...the chairman reminded his public that 'Revolution is Not a Dinner Party.

Such a thin line

The central paradox...any given polity...must create a military establishment strong and effective enough to protect the state. On the other hand, it must somehow ensure that this same military establishment does not turn on the state that created it.

Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome

As Lindblom observes, "Seals are easily trained because they have an appetite for fish." Corporations are also relatively easy to control, because they have an appetite for money. To extend the metaphor, trying to get corporations to care about the public interest, rather than simply maximizing profit, is like trying to persuade the seal that he should love jumping through hoops, rather than eating fish. It's much easier just to give him a fish whenever he succeeds in jumping through the hoop.

Yeah, death penalty

Open full size
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/grading-the-worlds-shortest-manifesto

Mental improvement is about becoming less dangerous on your worst days.

Mental improvement is less about peak performance and more about floor management.

Open full size

So cool

nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/us/america-ancestry-census-data-map.html

8/16/2610 Jolts

AI;DR

(AI; didn’t read)

Mhmm interesting

Open full size

Chaos is the law of nature and order is the dream of man

Beautiful

Open full size

If you’re doing something that’s easy, it could be valuable but you’re about to get your ass whooped. Or it’s just not valuable

Beautifully put

Whatever happens in a city, happens in a uber. The roads are the cardiovascular system of a city.

Nietzsche don’t miss

Whatever is done out of love takes place beyond good and evil.

We need to bring back stained glass exit signs

Open full size

Beautifully put, grateful, but onwards.

All the items in this room were once out of reach; some not yet invented, others too rare or costly for the vast majority of people. Today, most of us lucky enough to live with them walk past without a second thought.
It is to humanity’s credit that we remain restless in the midst of all of this progress. We continue to look forward, pushing the frontier further with new treatments, new tools, and new institutions that will help future generations in ways we can’t even picture yet.
But our lives today are a gallery of past generations’ heroic efforts to do the same. It serves us, and honors them, to recapture whenever possible the old sense of awe at these wonders that have long since become commonplace.

We've come so far. The future is so bright

For most of history, surgery was done without anesthesia.

Fruit was a luxury: people used to rent pineapples to show them off at parties.

8/15/2619 Jolts

If you take objects out of a room, one by one, two things will happen. The first is obvious. You will miss some of the things you have taken away. The second is that you will notice the things that remain more than ever. Your attention will focus. You will be more likely to read the books that are left on the shelves. You will appreciate the remaining chairs more. And if there is a chess board, you are more likely to play chess. When things are taken from us, the stuff that remains has more value. It rises not only in visibility but also intensity. What we lose in breadth we gain in depth.

Beautifully put

I don't call experiences good or bad anymore. Only revelatory, because everything changes me
in the way I needed to be changed. I'm bad at predicting desire. The body, intelligent and perceptive, recognizes a source of immeasurable craving could emerge entirely unexpected - pungent blue cheese, tres leches sponge cake, gamey wild duck, stuffed pimento olives, chocolate soft serve.
To be warped by something is to know it forever. Recursion is gorgeous. But some advice against comfort: you do things in the world and you either like it or don't, and always, you learn. This is the point of internships, subleases, backpacking adventures and sabbaticals, though true submersion requires you to choose a thing again and again.

Open full size

Past a certain age, a man no longer speaks in terms of should or could, but instead is and will.

He ceases to live in the irrealis of the subjunctive and conditional, preferring the hard indicative and future tenses.

The hour grows late for hypotheticals and counterfactuals.

A co-conspirator is a beautiful way of putting it
https://www.thirdoikos.com/p/is-your-marriage-a-conspiracy-against

Open full size

Real

Open full size

The world is a very puzzling place. If you're not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else's mind.

At a certain level, a lot of your most impactful work will be based on instinct.

Light has no shadow

St. Francis of Assisi:

Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.

all 9

Open full size

If you think you can or cannot, you are right

Open full size

The universe rewards intensity of process but deeply punishes identification with outcome.

Lmfaoo that’s tough

Open full size

8/14/2612 Jolts

Terrible mix up

Open full size

It be like that sometimes

1858
Sept. 19: Decided that one must love and work, and that's it.
Sept. 20: Tired. Didn't love and didn't work.
Leo Tolstoy

Of all ridiculous things in the world what strikes me as the most ridiculous of all is being busy in the world, to be a man quick to his meals and quick to his work. So when, at the crucial moment, I see a fly settle on such a businessman's nose, or he is bespattered by a carriage which passes him by in even greater haste, or the drawbridge is raised, or a tile falls from the roof and strikes him dead, I laugh from the bottom of my heart.
And who could help laughing? For what do they achieve, these busy botchers! Are they not like the housewife who, in confusion at the fire in her house, saved the fire-tongs? What else do they salvage from the great fire of life

Nah

Open full size

Genius

Open full size

Hate this, but works are reflexive

Anytime a work of media becomes popular with some Type of Guy, public perception of the work shifts. The work is no longer mainly about whatever it's actually about. It's now mostly about the Type of Guy who is known to like it.

Any sufficiently high quality work will end up an attractor for some Type of Guy.
This leads to a tendency for works to end up defined more by the type of guy that happened to latch onto the work than any property of the work itself

These fucking boomers will never understand

In the way that you can’t really understand what it’s like to be a parent until you have kids, you can’t really understand how it feels to own property until it’s yours. We are on our second generation of people being locked out of ownership, confused why they are socialists.

Open full size

Evergreen

Open full size

When I see a man infatuated with logic, I wager at once that he is not logical.

Those salaries are insane

Open full size

8/13/2619 Jolts

Open full size

All things look invincible at their zenith
All things look unlikely at the foothills

Real asf

Open full size

Twitter algo weights

Open full size

Are people okay in the uk

Open full size

It’s something of a miracle that graspingness is not causative to greatness

Narrative validation

Open full size

Maybe we let it go

Open full size

Gotta have good opsec

Open full size

1 sigma each

Open full size

Nah why they do that to my man

Open full size

Cannot help myself but push or get out the way completely

It’s so interesting when someone is so close to getting it but they really don’t get it and you have the moral dilemma of whether or not to try to push them over the edge

Really destroys your impulsivity and taste for risk

Open full size

I support women, I’m like a human bra

They have ELO for poker, let get ittt

Not everybody likes me but not everybody matters

Open full size

8/12/2618 Jolts

Stable is that step backwards between successful and failing

Airport loungification has taken so much from us

Open full size

Lmfao my man shot his shot, literally

Open full size

My god

Open full size

Forever oscillating between these two

Open full size

Birds learn how to fall and fly at the same time

If a bagel can have everything so can you!

I want everyone pushing betting platforms in gitmo

Open full size

Feels right, but also just knowing when you need to do what is 9/10s of the work

the challenge is that some people would benefit enormously from hesitating more, while others need to stop hesitating altogether
'move fast and break things' is great advice for one temperament and disastrous advice for another. your mileage may vary

So, in short, a helpful strategy for becoming a magician: Surround yourself with people who look like magicians to you. Then imagine yourselt as one, older and wiser, in great detail. Imagine yourself as the person you would be afraid to say you want to be out loud to others (because it seems so ridiculously impossible right now. Write it down in great clarity and detail, then forget it. And let the part of your subconscious mind that still remembers lead you to becoming the things you want, and maybe, years later, check if it did.

Never regret thy fall,
O Icarus of the fearless flight
For the greatest tragedy of them all
Is never to feel the burning light.

Crying

Open full size

Focus on what you can affect and the amount of things you can affect naturally grow over time

Open full size

Gang

Open full size

Military manual 1943 lmao

Open full size

Accidents happen. That's what everyone says.
But in a quantum universe there are no such things as accidents, only possibilities and probabilities folded into existence by perception.

Genius of every kind consists in perceiving objects more vividly and completely than other people do.
That is why we find in good authors something so lucid and illuminating, that we are immediately convinced by their ideas.

I need a signed copy, don’t really agree much with his letter tho

Open full size

8/11/2616 Jolts

Wish we’d stop romanticizing poverty

It sucks, and people succeed in spite of not because of

Open full size

Onwards

Open full size

My god

Open full size

Italia looks so beautiful

Open full size

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us

There’s a whole category of persons who interpret disagreements as personal attacks

Art

Open full size

B-b-but I love looking in mirrors

There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.

Use it or lose it

Unused money devalues. Unused talent diminishes. Unused potential decays.
Unused machinery disintegrates. Unused time dies. Unused knowledge becomes a burden. What isn't used is abused. The tragedy of life isn't the ultimate death, but the resources that die within you when you are still alive. Use it, or you will lose it.

Conclusions are cheap

“Why read books when the AI can just summarize them?"
The summary was never the point. Reading is a sustained encounter with another mind. 300 pages of someone's thinking pressed up against your thinking, for hours, over days.
A summary gives you the conclusions. But conclusions are cheap.
What's expensive & rare & precious is the shape of the thinking that got there. You cannot compress that, you can only sit with it.

Never doubt the American consumers will and ability to consume

Open full size

All we need is a 25x of annual spend

Open full size

Monkee know, monkee do

Open full size

Amazing

Open full size

8/10/2615 Jolts

The first 20 minutes of boredom are withdrawal symptoms what comes after that is something you haven't experienced since you were a child.

Open full size

Magazines are so back

Open full size

Lmfao

Open full size

Worrying is like praying for something bad

Insane rates we do not have to stand for this shit what the fuck

Open full size

Break free

Open full size

You maybe lost 1 year or 5, but you saved the rest of your life. Do not fall for the sunk costs fallacy. ONWARDS!

Miss Joan Didion every day

I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it.
Not just to endure it, not just to sutter it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture.
To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it.
To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.

Isn't art always, to a certain extent, therapy for the artist?

Beautifully executed

Open full size

Much to think about

Open full size

It’s only just begun

Gonna be bumpy, but net good and solid soon

Open full size

8/9/2614 Jolts

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.

Kafka, you always manage to find the words my guy

I never wish to be easily defined. I'd rather float over other people's minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.

Joy is a muscle you build by dancing when you're inclined to stay in bed.

Once I get my resting heart during sleep below 40 I’m throwing such a banger

Open full size

There’s a genie in your phone, you just need to figure out what ya want

the bottleneck is increasingly knowing what you want

Funny how that works

The more you become interested in opportunity…
The more opportunity becomes interested in you.

My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers.

Interesting to think about

The father of seven has not finished a thought in four years. he is just moving. feeding. driving. wiping. his brain is soup and his back is finished and he has no opinions about civilization he is too tired for opinions. and meanwhile civilization is growing out of him like he is dirt and he doesnt even notice because there is milk on the floor again. the childfree man has read eleven books this year about the decline of the west and he is the decline and the books are the evidence and he will understand this at fifty eight in a room that is very clean and very quiet

When one generation tolerates a sin, the next generation will celebrate that sin, and then the generation after that won't know it's a sin anymore.

Fucking discussing

Miss those days

Never forget

Lmao, find god

Dandelion fountain

8/8/2624 Jolts

Mainline this

Open full size

Poor kid, can feel it on the page

Open full size

Do not fear

Open full size

Travel light, even yesterday is luggage

Camus you never lied

The habit of despair is worse than despair itself

Never break

I knew that it was cruel to be so optimistic, but, in my solitude, I couldn't resist the urge and spent entire days basking in idiotic fantasies, sometimes verging on prayer.

Soon

Open full size

Water which is too pure, has no fish

I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever 1 could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. I only ever desired what was beyond my imaginings.

Never give in

When you are used to the kind of life-of never getting anything you want-you stop knowing what it is you want.

LMFAO

Open full size

Sugar dissolves in water, so, please don’t walk in the rain

Open full size

Perhaps my only real expertise, my only talent, is to endure beyond the endurable.

Open full size

He needs to stop defying nature and get the fuck off the internet

Open full size

10/10 no notes

Open full size

Is you shitten me

Open full size

How much we write off as talent is just relentless practice

I didn't have any particular gift in my twenties. I didn't have any exceptional qualities. It was the persistence and the great love of my craft which finally became a discipline, which finally made me a craftsman and a writer.
The only reason I finally was able to say exactly what I felt was because, like a pianist practising, I wrote every day. There was no more than that.

8/7/2618 Jolts

Open full size

Lmaooo

Open full size

Cranberry juice has crazy tannins

Why does cranberry juice taste like it doesn’t want to be wet

Love this

Open full size

Try try again

Open full size

Uhmmm

Open full size

You just don’t do that, wild disrespectful

Open full size

Lmao people are insane

Open full size

Jesus

Open full size

The put the bush shoe throwing on a ring. We live in the best times

Open full size

Terafab— we need more of these !!!

Open full size

8/6/2610 Jolts

Will try my best

Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.

Constantly oscillating between these two

Open full size

Looks goooood

View post on X

Open full size

Ways to buy and sell time

Open full size

Spanish lamp from 70s

Open full size

The soul troubles the Spaniard, and that's why he wants to die. Either he becomes a bandit—not to steal, to see if someone will kill him; or he becomes a saint—not to live a holy life, but to annihilate himself.

8/5/2613 Jolts

😞

She always told me that truth and beauty were ultimately the same thing, and that one day I would understand that.

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/08/in-memory-of-my-wife-elise-cawley-1961-2026-with-thanks-for-36-wonderful-years/

A meme is compressed philosophy

Open full size

‪Aspire to be the blue sheep day in and day out ‬

Open full size

Copy right law is so interesting.

They included termination you have a 5 year window to get back your work incase you were young and dumb.

So they include this concept of Authorship as that can never be transferred, unlike ownership which can.

Explains so much

Open full size

Crying

Open full size

People really do not understand focal lengths and can lead to wild dysmorphia.

Why the ai arms race is crucial. Technology, like everything else, takes shape of the creator so either you create it or pay the price in weird ways you can’t even begin to fathom

One of my firm beliefs is that the spread of the front-facing camera, designed in Asia to flatter Asian facial features, is responsible for the massive wave of disastrous facial treatments being undertaken by women and increasingly men in the West. We're seeing a kind of mass psychosis— a fracturing of the self— caused by a camera device that by design distorts the facial features of European people.

The universe isn’t on a budget

Ask for it all, and then some

The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense - he is "collective man," a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind.

Wilhelm Reich on staying sane in an insane world

Keep one's life financially independent.

Continue unabated to exercise one's power of creativity in concrete, strenuous tasks, always seeking perfection as near as possible.

Carefully cherish LOVE of a partner with full gratification, of the total emotional being if possible, of the body in a clean way if necessary.

Keep out of the trap of confusion by the average man and woman, helping others to keep out of the trap too as best they can.

Keep one's structure clean like brook water through knowing and correcting every mistake, making the corrected mistake the guiding lines to new truth.

Never yield to the expediencies of life except where it is basically harmless or where the main line of development is not impeded for the duration of one's life.

Open full size

BREAKING NEWS
They’re making a day when things are better, they’re calling it tomorrow

Comedy

Open full size

nytimes.com/2026/08/04/magazine/trump-rfk-steak-kimchi-diet.html

8/4/2626 Jolts

You cannot feel guilty, there’s no end to it. You can do all you can to help give everyone equal opportunities, but feeling guilty is not going to help you nor them

If we were to eliminate every unearned advantage in life, we should start with parents who read bedtime stories to their children

More of this

Open full size

Watch your step

Open full size

Treat your imagination like prophecy instead of fantasy

No way, I’m sweating out my eyes right now what the fuck 😭😭😭‬

Open full size

Can predict someone’s thoughts on taxes by their contribution

Open full size

I’m no longer asking ChatGPT, I’m conjuring spirits for the Truth

Agency? Oh you mean The Triumph of Will

Open full size

Whodathunkit

Choose your beliefs wisely

Your brain is a lawyer, not a judge—it argues for what you already believe, not what’s true.

Open full size

Many places actually, send their docs in training to torn places, cause what liability

Open full size

Simple, really

Open full size

Sometimes I get emotional about fonts

Open full size

IT’S BEEN LIKE THAT FOR A MINUTE HEDI SLIMANE

Everyone knows adidas ate a €1 billion loss on Yeezy inventory
BUT Only Yeezy impairment ever disclosed: €12 million.
They sold their inventory stock for ~€1.4B across 2023-24 and booked ~€500M of operating profit.

Bell curve
Open full size

Honestly, often the case

I didn't learn anything. I already knew I wasn't supposed to do that

Open full size

Whodathunkit

Open full size

Just keep moving directionally, it will compound

Open full size

A good traveler has no fixed plans,
and is not intent on arriving.

Mr. Gorbachev tear down all but the ONE wall!

people go around with all these walls in their mind to stop inappropriate thoughts whereas i just have ONE good wall between thought and action and as long as that's solid i can think whatever the Fuck i want

It’s never been a specific reason, which is why any of the attempts to counter misinformation have fell flat. They do not trust you, or their govt. To build it back, the best way to transfer that trust might just be a dividend per household near the data center.

Open full size

open.substack.com/pub/jasmine/p/no-data-centers-in-my-backyard

Open full size

Lmaooo nah, this discovery is going to be so crazy
Open full size

openai.com/index/apple-is-getting-this-wrong

Lmfao

Open full size

8/3/2631 Jolts

Brb

Open full size

Never coming down but can’t risk wasting those precious years, just in case

Open full size

Need to see if they took into account mingle child for second

Compared to second-born children, first-borns are at a greater risk of being diagnosed with a large number of conditions, from ADHD to autism.
Contrarily, second-borns are more likely to have documented substance abuse issues
Open full size
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44360-026-00177-z.pdf

There must be one

Open full size

Amazing
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10835-7.pdf

Open full size

Be there in a shake

The photographer went OFF
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/138-Amenia-Rd_Sharon_CT_06069_M34074-29533

People with similar autistic traits seem to connect on their own social wavelength.

Their brains synchronized during conversation in distinct patterns depending on whether they were paired with someone who shared similar autistic traits.

https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223(25)01305-8/abstract

Open full size

sciencedirect.com/user/identity/landing

If this happens I’m buying and giving away 20 dozen nuggets

Open full size

Beautifully put

I am in constant awe of our ability to create. it might be the most astonishing thing we were ever handed, and every single one of us is walking around with something inside us - just begging to be let out. you can arrange letters in an order that makes a stranger ache. you can pull music out of dead silence. you can build a product or tool that did not exist anywhere else until the moment you dragged it into being. I cannot get over how staggering that is. do not let it sit in you unused.

Half rebel
Half healer

Can point to cases of this in our age endlessly

Mao does not often include details in his writing. His instructions are aphorisms – not “do this”, but “see that this is done”. And of course, there is a great gap between what the appropriate things to do were, and what outcomes they would actually lead to. If things lead to disaster, they can be disavowed as being a misunderstanding, and not showing the fundamental wrongness of the program.

Jesus, what a lens, explains a lot

The median voter in America is a Maoist. They do not believe in tradeoffs. They believe that, if only everyone were good and honest and working toward the right goals, good things will happen.

https://open.substack.com/pub/nicholasdecker/p/the-median-voter-is-a-maoist?r=36pad&utm_medium=ios

Looks like he achieved his true goal that night irregardless

Open full size

You have to give fuck about something

As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.

People who can't face their problems want to make their problems your problems.
Jung put it well:

Anything repressed will be projected onto others.

Perception is very underrated and a very complicated game. But rests on the foundation of the inner self

It's almost mind-blowing how important status is. Most people will never see past your perceived status and their reactions will be 100% dependent on your perceived status
People will gang up viciously on a non-conforming person of "Low-status" to coerce them into conformity despite their having harmed no one, but struggle to bring that same energy to those in some kind of power doing far worse things that harm many.

Destruction is just clearing the way for construction

The confidence losing it all imprints, may just be worth it

Open full size

Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing.

Faster and faster

Open full size

3d printer needed expeditiously

Open full size

Lines as 3rd spaces is insane

Open full size

A terrible trade, never give in

Open full size

Cognitive vulnerability

Open full size

‪Wish more people would realize this and stop pussyfooting around & turn to building something grand ‬

“Lean Startups” were always about making startups inner metrics legible to investors at the cost of their customers.

Sometimes you gotta play devils avocado

People wave off stuff like tarot, horoscope, superstitions etc but they’re net-beneficial as they're structured version of introspection

There’s this tendency to underestimate how much govt would prefer to just know than a quick enforcement that just sends stuff underground ‬

They’re hoping that more criminals and terrorists use crypto and use blockchains because there's a trail.

The alternative is the hawala system... Two cousins in two countries, money never actually moves, one just tells the other the family has it. No digital trail whatsoever, because nothing has happened digitally. No paper trail, no nothing.

This actually the inverse of the toughness of the field
Von Neumann said it best

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

Open full size

8/2/2626 Jolts

WRT appetite bounce back post glps

The doctors behind this research are misunderstanding "appetite" measures.

When people report that their appetite is back, but they nevertheless continue eating less only when they're on the drug, that means the meaning of the measure has changed.

Appetite_T1 != Appetite_T2

Game theory explains why recovery attempts frequently do more damage than the original downfall.

Your instinct will always be to erase the mistake in one fell swoop: the one genius move that puts everything back tonight.

You're probably underestimating your ability to innovate and your capacity for enduring hardship.

When potatoes were first discovered/invented, there were 30+ varieties and all of them were toxic.
They needed to eat clay alongside the potatoes to bind the toxins.

I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.

Etymology is so fun

Open full size

Cannot kill this spirit, otherworldly things do not die

I will live, even if life betrays me and I will dream, even if dreams abandon me.

Chaorderly, new favorite wombo

Where the Atlantic and Pacific meet

Open full size

Nightmares

Open full size

It’s right there.
Go for it.

Open full size

Jung said it best

Parents should always be conscious of the fact that they themselves are the principal cause of neurosis in their children … Children are driven unconsciously in a direction that is intended to compensate for everything that was left unfulfilled in the lives of their parents.

I have little sympathy for the mathematicians crying about ai compressing their identities. You were warned, your hubris led you to think you were doing something a machine could never.

Welcome to the real world, schools finished.

I trust most of them will be fine, even if they don’t know it yet but not tolerating the crying.

Check the proof the machine spit out in the mean time, thank you

They want you caught up in the distraction, fear, and doubt

Contingency plan, but once decisions been made, fly off the blocks and keep the blinders on

Lmfaooo

Probably nothing!

Carpe diem

People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter...like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice

Tragedy is simple, but comedy is complex because it touches human life in far more places than tragedy.

A/W 4004 BC

Open full size

People really forget how much intrinsic respect for our fellow man we have. All downstream of:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.
Open full size

ICYMI Alpha Zero did reinvent the best chess openings. Had no access to human games.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815

People become so myopic with their spreadsheets and forget the fact there are things that cannot be measured. They never show up on a balance sheet, and when they go you’ll never quite know

This was quite obvious when you’d dig into the people that were pushing the "it fades" trope.
Yeah it fades for YOU.
Like everything else YOU have ever gotten involved in.
GO HOME

https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsq092

Can’t expect to get away without a scrape or cut

Open full size

Practicality is usually the case

Know why there are so many fewer clinical studies of LSD than other psychedelics (not talking ibogaine; that’s another issue)? Because it lasts so long and most lab employees just won’t/can’t stay that long. Seriously.

8/1/2643 Jolts

One of the most thoughtful interviews regarding the film(still haven’t seen it)

View post on X

Sometimes you have have the wrong lens on the situation and should step away and come back to it

Open full size

What a happy family

Open full size

Happy birthday to the southern hemisphere horses

Open full size

Flag of United States Fish and Wildlife Service (1949-1989)

Open full size

Adapt or lose

Open full size

Everyone says “follow the money” until it’s time to actually parse through the money and then it’s just easier to cry incompetence.

God forbid you have to dig further than a layer or two

Open full size

Ye contracts wild, he really took on so much out of pocket and liability for the sake of getting the art out how he wanted.

Worth it

https://medium.com/discourse/kanyes-contracts-reveal-dark-truths-about-the-music-industry-956418641df2

GOAT became a word the year the goat arrived.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/time-traveler/1996
Open full size

Open full size

Wrong.
The slop will continue to be refined until it’s no longer differentiable

Open full size

People do not understand the scale Meta works at. Narrative has been far removed from reality, it will pay off, soon

Open full size

No, it’s not. Your math is just wrong.

Open full size

Maintain the memory of a goldfish

Open full size

Would bet on this

Open full size

Issey

Open full size

Re: JPY, weakening dollar, rotation has already begun. Plan accordingly

Yeah, sure, in theory, but China doesn't care about textbooks and theory

Open full size

James Baldwin, 1963

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

Never retard expressing yourself for the sake of how it'll be viewed by others

Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.

Until death, all defeat is psychological

Although it might be difficult right now, you have made it through difficult times before. You will make it through this, too

We must make an effort to be more understanding and forgiving to our fellow man

If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice
and violence we inflict upon our own natures.

Nic Cage's comeback is what the world needed.

My alone time is for everyone else's safety

How much of life is just people living vicariously through others

People want to hear songs with the words they're afraid to say.

... there is a fate worse than death / and its living to hear eulogies / for the person you could have been

Remember what it's all for

No good thing is pleasant to possess, without friends to share it.

It's simple, but not easy.

For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.

Cooking

💃🕺

Hard

Something in you narrates, and something else witnesses the narration

Sometimes you gotta check in on yaself

Open full size

Chat this true

Open full size

Next time ac is out

Open full size

Until death all defeat is psychological

Open full size

The net good for all will far outweigh the weirdness

Open full size

Minimalism must go, maximalismmaxxing trinkets galore

Open full size

Should’ve done the cheap Japan trips when we had the chance

Open full size

“You’re either alive or dead”

Open full size

Honestly knowing there’s better models inside really is the best recruiting tool cause if I could just get access to a lil bit for side projects I’d put my time in

https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/

People really love giving unsolicited advice for situations they’d never be in

YOU would do 4% annually, that’s why YOU would never get there.

Open full size

7/31/2623 Jolts

Open full size

A/C really is the backbone of civilization

Open full size

Just do it

It’s important to remember what a thing is there for. Not the stated wishful thinking but boots on the ground take

Panels and breakout sessions, so real

Could be as low as $10.
He’d beat the shit out of me if he saw me say no and leave $ on the table

Onwards

Twins

We’d never have built modernity if stuff was as captured by doomers and regulators today

Mona Lisa. We should wonder art sounds like

New camera tek, cannot even fathom how bright the future will be !

This is how you teach life lessons

You gotta go above and beyond

The Soul is repository of information that we gather during a lifetime.

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another."

A gardener is a futurist

An idea is born fragile, you need to protect it, as if you would a new born child. Until it’s capable of being something that can stand on its own.

Harpy Eagle is the most powerful Eagle in the world. It’s wingspan can get up to 7.5 feet.

KAW

Fuck the jones act. All my homies hate the jones act

Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will rule our life and we’ll call it fate

“Abracadabra” is Aramaic: “avra kehdabra,”
I create as I speak.

You cast spells with your speech

The four mahābhūtā of mind:

Earth supplies resistance that anchors.
Water binds while allowing flow.
Air opens the clearing for nearness and farness, approach and withdrawal.
Fire sparks change and intensification.

On Leopold. People love to build you up to tear you down. He'll be back. Swimming with the sharks you can't expect to not get bit.

7/30/262 Jolts

Cool site that shows what comedians end up making per show. Really clean up on tours.

Most people don't even realize they aren't using ai in its full capacity. Simply cause those capabilities paywalled off. Such early innings