Author: Andrew
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Scott Alexander on Blogging
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Mind capture
How do you know if your mind has been captured? I think a simple health check is to ask yourself: Who do I respect? When there are issues or questions you face, these people are a good measure against those issues or questions. What do they think? What would they say? I do not mean,…
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“If it can happen to them, it can happen to you”
“Let’s be clear: without due process rights, anybody — yes, that means you — could be swept up in a raid and dumped in some hellhole and then the government could say, “Well, too late.” Citizenship is no protection if there’s not even a process in place to determine one’s legal status. One need not have any sentimental feelings about…
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Tick-Tock
“It was the summer of 1996, early June, and I was teaching a course at Simmons College in Boston to make some extra dough. Jennifer was clerking for a lawfirm down in Dallas, pregnant with our first child. My dad called. He and my mom were in London, where they had rented a small flat…
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“Is it okay?”
This essay from Robin Sloan (new to me!), shared by a friend, thinks about the outcomes of giving away (unwillingly) our collective creation of the internet to the AI. This particular section was worth remembering and thinking about: The Everything framework is pretty cool. Basically, we gave everyone the ability to type into one book…
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Thoughts from my run, #1
Some of my best thinking happens while listening to podcasts on my runs. It is hard to remember them specifically. Often, I remember just a sense of what their substance was. So, this type of post is, now, an attempt to remember some of the specifics. The podcast I was listening to on today’s run…
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“Just spend the time thinking”
I’ve thought about how true this could be from an attentional perspective with wanting to get better at something. I.e., if I wanted to get very good at skateboarding, or thinking, or wanted to get progressively smarter at a thing, Time + Effort X Attention seems to = Progress. Most of us are used to…
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Studio Ghlibi and Sadness
In the way it seems only Twitter can do, one person drove this week’s discourse. Open AI dropped a new release to GPT 4o and gave everyone a heads up that certain style replications are pretty cool. Studio Ghlibi was tried and it went off. Every image was in the style of Studio Ghlibi. This…
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Style to remember
This style and taste in this tweet made me feel good when I saw it. So much of what’s presented to me online seems like it’s meant to make the observer feel a negative emotion. I don’t think it’s that intentional, I just think the Algorithm has conditioned new content with an awareness that if…
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A Secular Age
by Charles Taylor A friend, who is a philosopher, told me about Charles Taylor a few years ago. His thinking on communitarianism have stuck with me. Picked this up from the library recently, read the intro, and flipped around through the rest. It’s pretty dense and a bit too academic for my constitution, so I…