flâneur

Joyce Li

12 followers · 29 following · 1238 views

on the atlas — 55

highlights — 95

  • For a DINK with disposable income, I could definitely stand to buy less stuff. I use this list of companies as a reminder that I'm probably not getting the best value or quality from these companies anymore, however rosy my perceptions of them used to be.
    The enshittification of things (and a list of private equity-owned companies) – Crystal Lee
  • The arc of my work has fit this shape. I aim to do things that I would be excited about 1, 5, or 10 years into the future. In other words, I pursue projects that I am personally drawn to, no matter what I am doing, as I uphold my individual inclinations and beliefs.
    School, Home
  • Jevons paradox: the cheaper something is, the more people will want it. Cheaper software leads to more demand for software. Cheaper therapy leads to more demand for therapy. When the cost of something drops, it expands the potential market for that thing. Demand is not fixed; it is elastic, perhaps infinite.
    Notes on AI, Labor, and China - by Jasmine Sun
  • During deindustrialization, many economists overestimated how many laid-off factory workers were willing to retrain or move. In China, it matters that college grads don’t want to do blue collar work.
    Notes on AI, Labor, and China - by Jasmine Sun
  • So we may end up in a world where most people work has handmaidens to the super-rich, while they themselves settle for cheap digital alternatives. I think about the hourglass economy that already exists in San Francisco: every day, thousands of service workers commute into the city to make salads and clean offices for the high-paid tech workers who live here. If too many people flood into the relational sector, this could still depress wages, as it has in China.
    Notes on AI, Labor, and China - by Jasmine Sun
  • Self awareness without action is just well informed suffering. You don’t need another framework. You need to let yourself want something and then ask for it.
    Patterns in Emotionally Intelligent Women Who Are Stuck
  • The less you need, the less you receive. And you’ve been treating deprivation like a virtue.
    Patterns in Emotionally Intelligent Women Who Are Stuck
  • I can want money AND want to figure this out on my own timeline I didn’t leave my financial goals at the door. I set a goal for my first year of freelancing: make a third of what I made at my full-time job. Which, yes, is basically a junior salary. But it’s the first time in my life I made money entirely on my own terms
    Your career break will break you. That's the point.
  • I’d chat with them and they’d be buzzing about their new teams and their new projects and their new salaries and I’d hang up the call and stare at my ceiling and think: okay so what exactly is wrong with me.
    Your career break will break you. That's the point.
  • To-do lists won't motivate you. Feeling like 8 hours happened in 1 hour will feel better.
    I'm 38. If You're in Your 20's or 30's, Read This.
  • 30. Go visit a retirement home so you know what dying feels like. Then use it as motivation.
    I'm 38. If You're in Your 20's or 30's, Read This.
  • 29. Spend more time with your parents than feels normal. Soon they'll be gone.
    I'm 38. If You're in Your 20's or 30's, Read This.
  • realize their costs in CAD.
    Valuation of Metals & Mining Companies Part I: Introduction | Sell Side Handbook
  • appreciating USD is generally good for mining companies
    Valuation of Metals & Mining Companies Part I: Introduction | Sell Side Handbook
  • determined by number of ounces or pounds mined and can be ascertained from the company guidance
    Valuation of Metals & Mining Companies Part I: Introduction | Sell Side Handbook
  • much more volatile and difficult to determine as they depend on the recovery grade of the ore, number of ounces mined and the underlying price of the metal
    Valuation of Metals & Mining Companies Part I: Introduction | Sell Side Handbook
  • “The undergrads are laser-focused on this triumvirate of banking, consulting and tech,” she said. “They have all sorts of ideas that they want to do to change the world, and then they end up in these same three places.”
    What the Top-Earning 5% of Millennials Did Differently - WSJ
  • the truth is, i joke that you lowkey kinda suck, but you’re actually a very good dog for a specific time and place. if i cultivated crops, which i do not, they would be untouched. if i needed protection, which i do not, i would be safe. if i operated a tick farm, which i do not, i’d be killing it. you are a good country dog. you were just never cut out for this godforsaken city. it’s alright. many people aren’t either.
    an open letter to my dog who, if i'm being completely honest, lowkey kinda sucks
  • one day while paying my dog walking bill online i saw a “notes” section on your profile. i clicked on it, and it said “be careful. will confront large men” which is how i found out you were a radical feminist. the note weighed heavily on my heart. you were always so good with people, as long as they weren’t wearing motorcycle helmets, which you hated.
    an open letter to my dog who, if i'm being completely honest, lowkey kinda sucks
  • We just wanted a dirty house with friends.
    Stanford’s War on Social Life
  • The reality of the neighborhood system is that it strips students of their ability to form distinct personalities or formal friend groups. I am in Neighborhood S. Some of my friends are in Neighborhood N. It doesn’t actually matter. The neighborhoods are not based on geography—many houses in the same “neighborhood” are on opposite sides of campus—and have no personalities outside of their letter name. They are distinctions without meaning.
    Stanford’s War on Social Life
  • He talks about escaping the life of an “excellent sheep”, like this paraphrase – “since many of the kids that go through college do so in a way that is super high achieving when the goals are set externally; set on a path, these kids fly like a fantastically directed arrow” (just like him, I was one of them).
    Conviction is the Scarcest Resource: Essays About Gaining Real Conviction
  • because private equity-owned companies are saddled with such a huge amount of debt, they often can’t even attempt to make the investments they need to try to keep up. Private equity’s objective, in theory, is that the company will earn enough and grow fast enough to pay down the debt to a healthy amount. But a lot of that time, that’s not what happens.
    Private equity, explained - Vox
  • She believes its methodology for calculating job creation is “highly suspect,” and it still doesn’t mean the leveraged buyout model is good: “Some of the companies they work for are owned by private equity, but that doesn’t tell us whether their family would be better off if it was on the public markets.”
    Private equity, explained - Vox
  • We agreed that some long term relationships grow distant when both parties aren’t quite sure what to talk about anymore. When the plane of understanding has shrunk. I find that profoundly sad. You lose shared context, and realize there’s nothing substantial left. The love is always there, like an invisible weight, but we can’t always get it back.
    old friends - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix
  • I think it’s valuable and magical to have so much context on a person. That knowledge is pure and hard to replicate.
    old friends - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix
  • you never meet the same person twice, not even in the same person
    old friends - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix
  • creates liquidity using a complex arrangement of preferred equity financing
    Private Equity’s Slump Propels a Firm That’s Ready to Offer Cash - BNN Bloomberg
  • For Nora, what an amazing gift that her friend has brought her — she gets to know that her 12-year-old self was very much loved, and she has the opportunity to say good-bye to the girl she left behind. And Hae Sung wanted to meet the woman this 12-year-old girl became — and then he gets to close the door. And Arthur wants to know his wife better, so how wonderful he gets to meet his wife as a 12-year-old crybaby at the end of the film.
    'Past Lives': Celine Song and Greta Lee Break Down Film's Ending
  • “How can we find drama in three people trying to do their best to not hurt each other, even though the situation is impossible?”
    'Past Lives': Celine Song and Greta Lee Break Down Film's Ending
  • What does this mean professionally (becoming a deliberate and seasoned investor) and personally (an ambitious friend, partner, writer)? There are tradeoffs even if I pretend they don’t exist. We’re often trading externally validated ‘professional success’ and personal freedoms in subtle ways.
    ambitious women - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix
  • When I walk around San Francisco, its blue pallor, its wisteria and lopsided Victorians and the hulking metallic city center, the long, warm, perimeter of horizon, I think of how easy it is to be absorbed into one valorized version of competence.
    ambitious women - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix
  • She landed accidentally in a funeral, right in the middle of the green twigs.
    What Happens When an Algorithm Helps Write Science Fiction | WIRED
  • The primary reason that midlife transitions are so hard and misunderstood is that they frequently require a complete reversal in the way we have operated up until this point. We need to surrender to subtle, intuitive evolutionary forces that are vastly more effective guides than our limited-but-loud intellect.
    What Nobody Tells You – Sapient Capital
  • As long as it doesn’t get so comfortable in there we forget to change.
    What Nobody Tells You – Sapient Capital
  • But it sometimes means adopting a professional persona that increasingly conflicts with your internal sense of integrity. The mask that eats your face. Too often we’re paid to stagnate, not to grow.
    What Nobody Tells You – Sapient Capital
  • The subjectivity of art extends beyond the artist’s own intentions, so a critic can discover new ways of seeing art in their criticism in the same way that artists find new ways of seeing the world in their art.
    Negative Criticism | The Point Magazine
  • the mainstreaming of “nerd culture” is the result of society at large attempting to prolong childhood indefinitely.
    Negative Criticism | The Point Magazine
  • Like most teenagers, I had no ability to make judgments outside of parroting opinions from elsewhere, no sense of the overarching history of the genre or even much ability to listen actively and make my own observations. My affectation of an opinion was laughably overstated, but that’s how one gets started developing an actual point of view.
    Negative Criticism | The Point Magazine
  • Another implication of subjective absolutism, alongside the insistence that no one should feel guilty for their “guilty pleasures,” is that these guilty pleasures are the only real pleasures.
    Negative Criticism | The Point Magazine
  • There is, admittedly, a fragment of truth in this. I know very well the dangers that criticism can pose to enjoyment: I was born a pathological overthinker, neurotic and hard to please. For years I nursed vague artistic aspirations, but it turns out that obsessively thinking about art is a bad way to become an artist. Thinking about a movie or a piece of music while it plays is a mental digression, a self-awareness of the act of experiencing that pulls one out of the act of seeing and listening.
    Negative Criticism | The Point Magazine
  • Five stars is as good as it gets (at the time of writing I’ve given ten five-star ratings out of roughly eight hundred reviews, and six of those have been for historical shows), four is an unconditional success, three is indifferent, two is an unconditional failure, and one star signifies something I found personally offensive. But I quickly realized that my habits were more suited to going to galleries every week than to working regularly on longer pieces, that there weren’t very many shows I wanted to write about at length, and that a regular stream of blithe, off-the-cuff reviews would attr…
    Negative Criticism | The Point Magazine
  • Pepperoni is a variety of spicy salami made from cured pork and beef seasoned with paprika or other chili pepper.
    Pepperoni
  • The term "pepperoni" is a borrowing of peperoni, the plural of peperone, the Italian word for bell pepper. The first use of "pepperoni" to refer to a sausage dates to 1919
    Pepperoni
  • But when a large language model scores well on such tests, it is not clear at all what has been measured. Is it evidence of actual understanding? A mindless statistical trick? Rote repetition?
    Large language models aren’t people. Let’s stop testing them as if they were. | MIT Technology Review
  • Food sovereignty more fully embodies the right to food because it adds a human dimension to food security, acknowledging that one should have a say in their relationship with food. This renders the movement more inclusive of other rights, too, as they prioritize the right to cultural life, rights of women (who are disproportionately affected by the oppression of farm workers), indigenous practices, and environmental rights
    Food Security vs. Food Sovereignty – NYU Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights Blog
  • To unpack these issues, this special forum brings together a collection of papers that highlight three overlapping themes that lie at the centre of these debates, yet which have not been fully acknowledged by those implementing CSA initiatives: the role of power and interests in shaping governance approaches to climate and food systems; the ways in which existing approaches, primarily those promoting open markets and technology, are reinforced in governance initiatives; and the sidelining of questions of inequality.
    Full article: The global political economy of climate change, agriculture and food systems
  • To make this thought exercise concrete: what happens in a world where everyone uses Instacart? That world is one in which grocery shopping is entirely instrumentalized. Gone are the local grocery stores and farmer’s markets, relegated to antiquated relics in uber-wealthy zip codes. It would be impossible for the average person to take pleasure in grocery shopping. In order for us to live in a world where you can take pleasure in grocery shopping, you must yourself take pleasure in grocery shopping now, and by doing so, demand that such a world exist.
    Value Beyond Instrumentalization - Letters to a Young Technologist
  • Those who enter the field usually have world-scale aims. We proclaim boldly that we hope to ‘change the world’; we praise the highly agentic. Founders are constantly asked to envision the path to a world where they’re massively successful. I propose, then, a revision of Kant’s imperative for technologists: do not work on something if you yourself do not want to live in the world where you are massively successful.3
    Value Beyond Instrumentalization - Letters to a Young Technologist
  • Humility is viewing yourself as more connected to others than you are separate from them—it is viewing others as an extension of you. When you internalize these principles, you begin to see yourself in others. It becomes more challenging to get angry at others, because you would implicitly be lashing out at yourself.
    humility vs. hubris - by Isabel - Mind Mine