flâneur

Ulisse mini

48 followers · 13 following · 1487 views

on the atlas — 37

highlights — 139

  • Humans just do stuff, it’s part of who we are. Happiness was never motivation — you just thought it was.
    You are happy by default - by Chris Lakin - Locally Optimal
  • I recommend reaching out to the authors, attending one of their workshops (if available), or buying the book to read carefully — with the expectation that you still have to do a year’s worth of trial and error.
    The Heart of Innovation: Why Most Startups Fail - Commoncog
  • Pleasure and anti-rape activism aren’t opposed; they’re opposite sides of the same coin.
    I Read A PUA Book And Learned How Rapists Think
  • Similarly, to cross the cringe minefield, you need to have humility about the fact that your perception is distorted, right now. You simply cannot see the landscape of options in your life objectively.
    Home | Substack
  • Cringe fields are where our biggest self-improvement gains are likely to come from, because they point to parts of the self we haven't allowed to develop
    Home | Substack
  • Waiting for a soulmate to appear without having a clear idea of what your soulmate looks like, or what you’re willing to give up to be with them. People-pleasing and adapting to others’ energies until you grow to hate them.
    Navigation by Moonlight - by Jacob Falkovich
  • Kinky Jungian pop-Buddhist shadow work is, however, rather niche
    Navigation by Moonlight - by Jacob Falkovich
  • A man will find many women physically attractive after a brief glance, which gives him both a clear target for direct action (to find out more and/or seduce her) and the motivation to do so. In contrast, a female friend of mine says that she finds most men unattractive: either dull or disloyal, emotionally immature, and blind to their own faults. For a man to be seen in a different light requires serendipity: an unusual situation where he can prove himself, or being vouched for by trusted friends. These situations can’t be forced.
    Navigation by Moonlight - by Jacob Falkovich
  • I don’t think this erosion is happening because under the hood my parts are now hugging for some reason, but because the parts themselves are disappearing because some major upstream priors that cause them to exist have gone.
    Buddha’s Basilisk - by Owen - blissbrah's blog
  • At times, the friction of the world can feel uncomfortable, the scratches and stings intolerable, and I long to retreat to the dryness, the quiet, the smooth and harmless surfaces of a private room. But I notice that I mostly feel this way when I’m sick in body or spirit, when my strength is at a low ebb and feels like it won’t be enough to face the world
    Friction Feels Good - by Jesse Crossen - Hinterlander
  • It’s about how that kind of love makes you believe in other kinds of love
    the friendship theory of everything
  • If you’re looking at practice as the time you have to blandly sacrifice so that you can be a Chill Meditator Person with a more persistently neutral facial expression, you’re already losing. That’s engaging in the kind of self-aggression that gets in the way of being alive—precisely the problem that meditation is supposed to address, rather than exaggerate. Meditation shouldn’t be a venue for staging another fight between you and how you’re supposed to be.
    What I wish someone had told me about starting a meditation practice
  • The natural reaction to this might be, “well, that was cool, but I’d better do the practice the way this book said, instead.” Try to resist this reaction, and instead, sink in, explore the passageway that has just been revealed.
    Should you meditate, and also, what is even meditation
  • The fight of ending the fight with oneself is inherently nebulous and personal.
    Should you meditate, and also, what is even meditation
  • Hence, my favorite meditation instruction ever, from Loch Kelly: “what is here when there is no problem to solve?”
    Should you meditate, and also, what is even meditation
  • what is here when there is no problem to solve?
    Should you meditate, and also, what is even meditation
  • It is said that the most tragic aspect of the hell realm is that none of the gates are barred.
    Neurotic Gradient Descent: (mis)Translating the Buddha
  • Upadana is a mental event that immediately follows Tanha
    Neurotic Gradient Descent: (mis)Translating the Buddha
  • generate their own fuel
    Neurotic Gradient Descent: (mis)Translating the Buddha
  • Sanskrit word for impermanence. So what is an actual translation of Anicca? Something more like our inability to maintain things as we like
    Neurotic Gradient Descent: (mis)Translating the Buddha
  • One sign of hope is the results of the Branch Specialization paper. The main result is that when neural networks have branches, similar neurons (and in particular specific neuron families) will self-organize into branches. This is perhaps vaguely similar to how biological brains have "regions" that seem dedicated to certain functionality. The branches are like brain regions, and the features and circuits of a certain kind focus there. This provides a kind of automatic organization. However, that main result only works if the model has branches baked into the architecture. It also breaks down i…
    Interpretability Dreams
  • Assuming that features are equally important and sparse, the best possible direction to not represent is the fully dense vector !
    Toy Models of Superposition
  • Empirically, it seems that the dimensionality of all features add up to the number of embedding dimensions when the features are "packed efficiently" in some sense.
    Toy Models of Superposition
  • Two years of BJJ didn’t make me a good fighter, but it did give me more self-knowledge than an equivalent amount of therapy.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • Anyway. There is a trope in romance that when you meet the person you are supposed to be with, you can talk about anything. You can apparently inverse that too: if you talk about anything that pops into your mind, you can tell if you're supposed to be with the person by judging their reaction
    Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • That is perhaps the most solid dating advice I have, by the way—show the inside of your head in public, so people can see if they would like to live in there.
    Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • More than anyone I know, I want you to see your innate worth, which is so completely obvious from the outside, but apparently concealed to you by habitual mental distortion.
    An open letter to 56 people I know - by Sasha Chapin
  • When I was a teenager I thought you were the coolest person in the world, and now I realize that adults who entrance teenagers are generally pretty limited.
    An open letter to 56 people I know - by Sasha Chapin
  • If she is uncomfortable with being frank about something, she will be frank about that
    Things You Learn Dating Cate Hall - by Sasha Chapin
  • The background tendency for pretty much every person, awakened or no, is to shrink from growth and avoid harsh feedback. Awakening just gives you more mental plasticity, and more fun avoidance tricks. This is why I think it’s actually kind of dangerous to do long-term serious meditation without some sort of skin in the game of life—like a career or cause or relationship that requires ongoing change.
    My mind transformed completely, and there were some tradeoffs
  • it will not be achieved without a huge amount of effort and struggle by many brave and dedicated people
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • In conclusion, fuck this game. I would rather lose than sell out. If you lie to the world you lie to yourself and one day you can no longer tell what’s true or not. I would live under a bridge and eat out of dumpsters if I got to know the truth.
    A disgusting playbook | the singularity is nearer
  • (1) it enables us to observe the model thinking in a legible way, and (2) the model reasoning about safety rules is more robust to out-of-distribution scenarios.
    Learning to Reason with LLMs | OpenAI
  • “What’s the equivalent of slonking eggs for bulking my brain?” and I answered: Ada Nguyen @adanguyenx @ashleydzhang seeking out extreme people and befriending them
    3 - seeking intensity - by Ada - Infinite Game
  • no longer even a brief moment where we believe there is such a being.
    6. Was That A Fetter Shift? - Simply The Seen
  • That last test filters out surprisingly few people. We could bear any amount of nerdiness if someone was truly smart. What we couldn't stand were people with a lot of attitude. But most of those weren't truly smart, so our third test was largely a restatement of the first. When nerds are unbearable it's usually because they're trying too hard to seem smart. But the smarter they are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like "I don't know," "Maybe you're right," and "I don't understand x well enough."
    How to Start a Startup
  • Let’s start with the concept of ‘moving chi with your mind’. To me, this is extremely straightforward to explain -unless- you believe a) that your thoughts have no influence over your nervous system, or (bizarrely) b) that your nervous system has no influence over your body.
    A pragmatic user’s guide to uh, chi – Autotranslucence
  • having your nervous system get influenced by another person’s nervous system without having the conscious perception of what changed to make your nervous system change. This makes it feel like the change was ‘magical’ or ‘spooky action at a distance’
    A pragmatic user’s guide to uh, chi – Autotranslucence
  • “When I try to set boundaries, I try to come at it from a place of love. At the end of the day, this is about loving ourselves and loving other people. Boundaries are how we protect ourselves so that we can keep the love flowing as much as possible, so we can give and receive as much love as possible. We have to have good boundaries to be able to do that and I think making that the focus of the boundary setting…is what makes it typically go smoothly when setting a boundary… [I aim to] keep the focus on self love and love for the other person.“
    Boundaries - Tasshin
  • incredible how trustworthy a person becomes merely by being a good steward of their own boundaries
    Boundaries - Tasshin
  • Revealing boundaries is a vulnerable act of intimacy. Someone could simply leave the room or situation instead, which honors their needs but closes off connection. Instead, by expressing a boundary, someone is saying that they want to stay connected to you.
    Boundaries - Tasshin
  • Revealing boundaries is a vulnerable act of intimacy. Someone could simply leave the room or situation instead, which honors their needs but closes off connection. Instead, by expressing a boundary, someone is saying that they want to stay connected to you. You can meet them in their vulnerability and desire to stay connected by listening to and honoring their boundaries. Doing so is a way to express that you also want to stay connected to that person, to keep relating to them.
    Boundaries - Tasshin
  • Revealing boundaries is a vulnerable act of intimacy. Someone could simply leave the room or situation instead, which honors their needs but closes off connection. Instead, by expressing a boundary, someone is saying that they want to stay connected to you. You can meet them in their vulnerability and desire to stay connected by listening to and honoring their boundaries. Doing so is a way to express that you also want to stay connected to that person, to keep relating to them.
    Boundaries - Tasshin
  • Notice how often that word has come up. If you asked an oracle the secret to doing great work and the oracle replied with a single word, my bet would be on "curiosity."
    How to Do Great Work
  • Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to.
    How to Do Great Work
  • An audience is a critical component of morale
    How to Do Great Work
  • It's not necessarily a bad sign if work is a struggle, any more than it's a bad sign to be out of breath while running. It depends how fast you're running. So learn to distinguish good pain from bad. Good pain is a sign of effort; bad pain is a sign of damage.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Husband your morale. It's the basis of everything when you're working on ambitious projects. You have to nurture and protect it like a living organism.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Seek out the best colleagues. There are a lot of projects that can't be done alone, and even if you're working on one that can be, it's good to have other people to encourage you and to bounce ideas off.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Originality is the presence of new ideas, not the absence of old ones.
    How to Do Great Work