flâneur

Bonnie Chin

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on the atlas — 270

highlights — 1326

  • We can understand the happiness of fishes—or ants, or inchworms—because what drives us to think and argue about such matters is, ultimately, exactly the same thing. Now wasn’t that fun?
    What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
  • “Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man,” Schiller wrote in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, “and he is only wholly a Man when he is playing.”
    What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
  • t came, instead, to be subsumed under the broader “problem of altruism”—another phrase borrowed from the economists
    What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
  • Competition over resources, rational calculation of advantage, and the gradual extinction of the weak were taken to be the prime directives of the universe.
    What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
  • tendency in popular thought to view the biological world in economic terms was present at the nineteenth-century beginnings of Darwinian science
    What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
  • I’m simply saying that ethologists have boxed themselves into a world where to be scientific means to offer an explanation of behavior in rational terms
    What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
  • Consider that every pile of text coiled out by AI had to pass through an army of editors, producers, judges, and audiences, and get their stamp of approval. Its output might be a crap performance of beauty and insight that mostly just succeeds in being maudlin and meaningless, but for a lot of people that’s clearly enough.
    If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you
  • Absolutely all AI prose is filler, an expanding foam insulation made of words.
    If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you
  • The reason it’s so hard to get AI to stop hallucinating is that it’s permanently hallucinating. Its whole existence is one long lurid trip. Most of the time, the AI’s hallucinations bear a spooky resemblance to reality
    If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you
  • I find it viscerally disgusting; a cold shudder like someone’s poured jelly down the back of my neck. I hate that it’s everywhere; I hate that when I read basically anything now I’m constantly on alert, twitching like a schizo in an underpass.
    If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you
  • The more I clicked around, the more I started to panic. There was nothing, no human voices anywhere, just thousands of versions of the same cheery demon. Am I alone out here? Something’s happened to the world; it’s all gone flimsy. Reality is a scarce resource.
    If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you
  • Those seeking to challenge permanently campaigning incumbents must also be in permanent campaign mode.
    Spectacle of Participation | Issue 35 | n+1 | The Editors
  • Sidney Blumenthal, author of a prescient study of political consultants published in 1982. “It remakes government into an instrument designed to sustain an elected official’s public popularity,”
    Spectacle of Participation | Issue 35 | n+1 | The Editors
  • however great his power, whose speech does not make for courage, sobriety, and right understanding, is simply a noxious element in the body politic
    Man in the Arena Speech - Theodore Roosevelt 1910
  • human rights must have the upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property
    Man in the Arena Speech - Theodore Roosevelt 1910
  • But we must not transfer our admiration to the reward instead of to the deed rewarded
    Man in the Arena Speech - Theodore Roosevelt 1910
  • He must pull his own weight first, and only after this can his surplus strength be of use to the general public. It is not good to excite that bitter laughter which expresses contempt; and contempt is what we feel for the being whose enthusiasm to benefit mankind is such that he is a burden to those nearest him; who wishes to do great things for humanity in the abstract, but who cannot keep his wife in comfort or educate his children.
    Man in the Arena Speech - Theodore Roosevelt 1910
  • These fill a useful function if they make it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; for some of the most valuable work needed by civilization is essentially non-remunerative in its character, and of course the people who do this work should in large part be drawn from those to whom remuneration is an object of indifference
    Man in the Arena Speech - Theodore Roosevelt 1910
  • 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 valiantly
    Man in the Arena Speech - Theodore Roosevelt 1910
  • a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform
    Man in the Arena Speech - Theodore Roosevelt 1910
  • Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twister pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt
    Man in the Arena Speech - Theodore Roosevelt 1910
  • To you and your kind much has been given, and from you much should be expected
    Man in the Arena Speech - Theodore Roosevelt 1910
  • recover the possessions of the mind
    Man in the Arena Speech - Theodore Roosevelt 1910
  • It is a mistake for any nation to merely copy another; but it is even a greater mistake, it is a proof of weakness in any nation, not to be anxious to learn from one another and willing and able to adapt that learning
    Man in the Arena Speech - Theodore Roosevelt 1910
  • The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly, that the life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift that comes from devotion to loftier ideals
    Man in the Arena Speech - Theodore Roosevelt 1910
  • The conditions accentuate vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good qualities and all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant, self-centered, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and blind to its own shortcomings.
    Man in the Arena Speech - Theodore Roosevelt 1910
  • The primaeval conditions must be met by the primaeval qualities which are incompatible with the retention of much that has been painfully acquired by humanity as through the ages it has striven upward toward civilization. In conditions so primitive there can be but a primitive culture.
    Man in the Arena Speech - Theodore Roosevelt 1910
  • his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat
    Man in the Arena Speech - Theodore Roosevelt 1910
  • Accepted decisions can take several forms:
    Teaching agents product design at Vercel - Vercel
  • Examples in the codebase include rules that:
    Teaching agents product design at Vercel - Vercel
  • resolves the request mode first: shape, implement, review, copy, or harden
    Teaching agents product design at Vercel - Vercel
  • That reasoning lives in design reviews, PR comments, Slack threads, and with the people who were in the room.
    Teaching agents product design at Vercel - Vercel
  • He’s just about to insist she shouldn’t devalue herself like that, that she’s just been violated and maybe shouldn’t be out tonight, should go home and practice self-care—and is astounded when everyone, including her, starts laughing.
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • With jagged touchiness, he calls them out, insisting that consent is nonnegotiable, that even if they’re joking, it’s textbook rape culture. “Well, what makes you think you can speak for them,” one says, smirking. “You’re a guy too. Why do you know better than us what women prefer? Especially considering they’re dating us.”
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • Dragging his virginity like a body bag
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • Not wanting to seem fragile or impugn their judgment or center the conversation on himself, he instead files this incident away in a thickening dossier of unfairness, privately reasoning that if they’re going to keep dating assholes, what do they expect.
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • “Men are dogshit.” And sure, fair, he understands they mean the patriarchy and not him specifically—but why’d she say that with him standing right there, unless he didn’t count as a man?
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • He figures that even bad relationships are better than none, since they prepare you for future relationships, and heartbreak is romantic and dignified, whereas rejection just makes you a loser.
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • but also because he doesn’t want to spoil his chances of dating her in the future, since it’s her prerogative, after all, to change her mind.
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • While he’s confident he handled everything respectfully, the girl’s praise only reminds him that none of his ostensibly good qualities are attractive enough to even warrant him a chance, which makes them seem worthless
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • He does get it. It sort of kills him, but he knows his rejector was only trying to spare his feelings, since men often react badly to “hard rejection.” So he validates her condolences and communicates them back until she’s convinced he’ll be fine. “Grrr, friend-zoned again!” he says, shaking his fists toward the ceiling, and they laugh together and hug and he walks back to his dorm just before sunrise.
    The Feminist | Issue 35 | n+1
  • good explanations often involve transforming the idea
    Research Debt
  • combining deep scientific understanding, empathy, and design to do justice to our research and lay bare beautiful insights.
    Research Debt
  • Part of thinking is having a conversation with ourselves.
    Research Debt
  • he cost of explaining stays constant as the group grows, but the cost of understanding increases with each new member.
    Research Debt
  • The maintainable size of the field is controlled by how its members trade off the energy between communicating and understanding.
    Research Debt
  • But perhaps I can visualize a number of subsidiary theorems or propositions such that if I could prove those, in turn I would eventually arrive at this solution.
    "Creative Thinking" by Claude Shannon speech transcript
  • If the minute you’ve found an answer to something, the next thing to do is to ask yourself if you can generalize this anymore – can I make the same, make a broader statement which includes mor
    "Creative Thinking" by Claude Shannon speech transcript
  • try to restate it in just as many different forms as you can. Change the words. Change the viewpoint. Look at it from every possible angle.
    "Creative Thinking" by Claude Shannon speech transcript
  • This is the reason why experience in a field is so important that if you are experienced in a field, you will know thousands of problems that have been solved.
    "Creative Thinking" by Claude Shannon speech transcript