flâneur

s j

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on the atlas — 173

highlights — 490

  • creative technologists might use code as means of emotional expression. What we all have in common is that we are using technology as our primary medium to say something, not to ship products.
    WTF is a Creative Technologist? by Tina Tarighian
  • The physical world holds enormous amounts of data that has long been either out of reach to collect or too messy to process but is essential to automation, optimization, and understanding. Now, sensors are proliferating, robots are becoming more capable and cheaper, and processing messy data quickly is achievable.
    Rebecca Kaden on X: "Data At The Edge" / X
  • “Insider Media is media for insiders, by insiders. Both creator and audience belong to the same in-group. The public gets to be in the room but is never the audience being catered to. The topic is less important than the audience whose opinion matters. It’s a closed-room broadcast where principals talk to principals while fans, aspirants, and adjacents watch, learn, and report out. Insider Media is the opposite of journalistic media—outsider media—made for outsiders by outsiders. Outsiders will call Insider Media an echo chamber or bubble, but the proximity is very much the product. This tensi…
    Erik Torenberg on X: "New Media, One Year In" / X
  • Another topic I must discuss is that of age. Historically, the greatest contributions of mathematicians, theoretical physicists, and astrophysicists are done when they are very young. On the other hand, apparently in music composition, politics, and literature, the later works are most valued by society. Other areas seem to fall in between these extremes, and you need to realize that in some areas you had better get going promptly.
    Dr. R. W. Hamming's Advice on Research
  • Many times a discussion with a person who has just done something important will produce a description of how they were led, almost step by step, to the result. It is usually based on things they had done, or intensely thought about, years ago. You succeed because you have prepared yourself with the necessary background long ago, without, of course, knowing then that it would prove to be a necessary step to success.
    Dr. R. W. Hamming's Advice on Research
  • Some people work with their doors open in clear view of those who pass by, while others carefully protect themselves from interruptions. Those with the door open get less work done each day, but those with their door closed tend not know what to work on, nor are they apt to hear the clues to the missing piece to one of their "list" problems.
    Dr. R. W. Hamming's Advice on Research
  • We have an opportunity to both define the category and push hard for the whole market’s growth. We’d be crazy not to take it, because the best possible way to find product-market fit is to define your own market.
    We Don’t Sell Saddles Here. The memo below was sent to the team at… | by Stewart Butterfield | Medium
  • we should be working carefully from both the product end and the market end: Doing a better and better job of providing what people want (whether they know it or not) Communicating the above more and more effectively (so that they know they want it)
    We Don’t Sell Saddles Here. The memo below was sent to the team at… | by Stewart Butterfield | Medium
  • Our agents are priced on outcomes. A customer doesn’t commit millions in spend unless that spend is making them tens of millions, and the way an agent makes them tens of millions is by doing the work their revenue comes from. So the unit we sell is a unit of revenue-aligned work. When the customer grows there’s more work, and when there’s more work the bill grows with it. We never have to sell them a bigger contract, because their growth does it for us. One day they look up and they’re happily spending millions with us.
    I think we're onto something
  • The real paradigm shift isn't "AI makes humans faster," it's "AI can perform entire workflows that humans currently perform," not necessarily because the AI is smarter than any individual human in any individual task, but because an agent can perform all the tasks, in sequence, at scale
    Aakash Thumaty on X: "Inference APIs are as dead as seat-based pricing" / X
  • SaaS companies who generate revenue directly based on the success of their customers have a structural advantage over those that generate revenue based on their ability to sell seats-based contracts
    Aakash Thumaty on X: "Inference APIs are as dead as seat-based pricing" / X
  • For me, having been raised in a culture that by default derives self-worth and personal identity from work, my sense of self-worth is lower unless I’m excited by what I’m working on. The worst nightmare I could have is if someone asked me “what are you building” or “what are you working on these days” and not have an answer I felt proud of. I’m certainly still on the journey, but sometimes taking the step back and remembering that you are enough is most important.
    Burnout at the chicken rice shop - by Spencer Yen
  • “It was really hard. Too much of my identity was attached to Lolly. So, when it failed, I kind of had a difficult ego death. I was really hurt. I had all this success. I had the best investors, I had a great team, and I had a good product. But I couldn’t make the thing go viral. “I sulked for a long period of time. It took me like six months of sulking. I just went to my dad’s house, and I hung out. It was kind of nice having no obligations and no company. When you start a company, you’re locked in on that roller coaster. You can’t get off. It was nice being free for six months. I took time to…
    One Babson Entrepreneur’s Story: Forbes 30 Under 30 2024 · Babson Thought & Action
  • what “getting a job” really means is finding a person with a problem and convincing them that you can solve it for them
    How to walk through walls - by Henrik Karlsson
  • AI has stopped being a feature and started being the foundation. We're excited about a new wave of startups rebuilding software
    Requests for Startups
  • the future of entertainment is content you can engage with.
    The Future of Entertainment Is Interactive
  • how absurdly lucky it is that i get to taste oranges and miss people and cry over songs and fall asleep on buses and feel my throat tighten when someone says my name softly.
    everything is a win when the goal is to experience
  • Anthropomorphization is the natural UX for AI agents (hey Chat, hey Claude).
    Meet the Agents at USV: Arthur, Ellie, Sally, and Friends
  • If you’re gonna be fine if you fail, and you think there’s a shot at something great, you should probably just do it.
    leaping - by Celeste 🌱 - celeste-land
  • your competitive advantage as a creative person won’t be access to the best model because everyone will have that. Instead, you need to know how to orchestrate models into workflows that deliver consistent value. Welcome to the world of visual programming.
    Creative Work Is About to Look a Lot More Like Programming
  • This translates to an average throughput of 3.5 PRs per engineer per day, and surprisingly the throughput has increased as the team has grown to now seven engineers. Importantly, this wasn’t output for output’s sake: the product has been used by hundreds of users internally, including daily internal power users.
    Harness engineering: leveraging Codex in an agent-first world | OpenAI
  • We can understand the role of 3D representations in the spatial realm by comparing them to code.
    3D as code | World Labs
  • In practice, this has forced us to organize very differently. If formats are where the alpha lives, then the work isn’t defending a single creative idea forever. It’s building a system that can surface new formats quickly, test them aggressively, and move on once the market catches up.
    UGC Is Dead And We Have Killed It
  • Temptation operates at both of these levels, with the former a simple binary (use or don’t) and the latter a gradient consisting of things like prompting more carefully, reviewing more diligently, engaging for longer, and calibrating the threshold at which you’re willing to accept “good enough.” The person who rewrites is tempted to revise, the person who revises is tempted to edit, and the person who edits is tempted to skim. At every point along the spectrum we’re being tempted with another opportunity to do less.
    The Last Temptation of Claude - by Harry Law
  • as artificial intelligence becomes cheap, biological intelligence may decline. A society can grow smarter while its members’ skills atrophy.
    On the Noble Uses of AI - Cosmos Institute
  • According to the emergent ideology of Silicon Valley, most people would prefer not to be human; they’ve demonstrated this through their revealed preferences in the way they use the apps they’re being sold. That’s all the proof that tech companies need to invest as much money as possible in friction-elimination tools that effectively dehumanize users.
    Brooding: In 2026, I Resolve to Friction-Maxx
  • I became more intimately aware of how much I did was inextricably tied to and made possible by someone else. Even as I spent hours on end nurturing ideas and cultivating them into public projects, they would've been meaningless without the community who gave me early feedback and decided to bet on (and believe in) me.
    opening yourself to support - by Spencer Chang
  • radical monopoly, which is that point where a technological tool is so dominant that people are excluded from society unless they become its users. We saw this with the automobile, we saw it with the internet, and we even see it with social media.
    A Website To End All Websites | Henry From Online
  • Tools are first created to enhance our capacities to spend our energy more freely and in turn spend our days more freely, but as their industrialization increases, their manipulation & usurpation of society increases in tow5.
    A Website To End All Websites | Henry From Online
  • the familiarity of home and the monotony of routine disguise the meaning behind these fleeting moments of interconnection. Traveling strips that away and makes me stare right at them and say, “Hey, this is really nice.”
    on traveling: to learn to live | writing
  • Times like these I will think about why we try anything at all. Sometimes it will feel very beautiful, as I feel now, when writing it down, but perhaps more often I will feel some existentialism as to what it’s all for
    returning to stanford | writing
  • I think being at school gave me “permission” to sit directionless: a) being a student, I’m expected to explore and enjoy this chapter of our lives
    returning to stanford | writing
  • What we’re seeing is a commodification of creative expertise - celebrities turning the skills they’ve developed over years of shaping their own careers into scalable services for others.
    The next wave of celebrity empires will be creative agencies.
  • The Washington Post is one established media brand that has leaned into the growing format of TikTok news skits.
    This Is the News From TikTok - The Atlantic
  • The modern experience is one of constantly being perceived. We view ourselves in the third person, as an entity to be managed. How will this action make me look? How can my lived experience be something I can capture?
    Gen Z and gen Alpha brought a raw, messy aesthetic to social media. Why does it feel as inauthentic as ever? | Eugene Healey | The Guardian
  • that’s what intimacy really is, not the illusion of perfection, but the permission to be imperfect and still be loved.
    when you're choosing a life partner, think beyond romance
  • i used to think that the most important thing was to have common interests, that if two people liked the same books, the same kind of movies, or shared a favorite city, love would somehow sustain itself. but i’ve learned it’s not about that. it’s about being similar in kindness, in the way you treat people, in the way you hold space for their flaws and for your own. it’s about how you deal with anger, not just whether you yell or stay quiet, but whether you choose to return to each other when the heat passes. it’s about patience, that delicate, invisible thread that keeps people together when …
    when you're choosing a life partner, think beyond romance
  • AI presumably opens interesting new opportunities, though we haven't seen much great work that only uses AI. (If jazz didn't exist, could you prompt Suno to create it? This seems like an open problem.) As such, we're neutral on the use of AI.
    A Call for New Aesthetics
  • I’ve realized I truly value creative thinking and collaboration. While leading clients on a dive requires strictly sticking to a routine and following standards, my previous jobs have all required thinking outside the box, questioning the status quo, and creating things that previously didn’t exist. My one favorite part of working with scuba students has been the personal aspect of getting to know new people and creating a good customer experience – which is something I always used to focus on in my jobs that revolved around developing deep empathy to solve customer’s problems through technolo…
    chapter 28: too much of a good thing - by Caitlyn Lubas
  • I felt not a desire to collect new experiences and places, but a yearning for doubling down on the places and people that already shaped the heavily contoured storyline of my life.
    a traveler's homecoming: from physically traveling for a year, to embracing a traveler's mindset at home
  • What I discovered by casting a wide net was that I have very little ability to predict how useful a call will be in advance. Relevance is easier to predict, but it’s not a very good proxy for usefulness, which is a product of lots of other things including the other person’s enthusiasm and the breadth of their interests. To some extent, the more confident I am that a conversation is relevant, the less likely I am to discover something exciting during it. Nearly all of my most fruitful collaborations over the last 3 years have come out of meetings I booked almost at random. My best conversation…
    How to be More Agentic - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • What is most striking about these videos, however, is the element they typically lack: other people. In these little movies of a life well spent, the protagonists generally wake up alone and stay that way. We usually see no friends, no spouse, no children. These videos are advertisements for a luxurious form of modern monasticism that treats the presence of other people as, at best, an unwelcome distraction and, at worst, an unhealthy indulgence that is ideally avoided—like porn, perhaps, or Pop-Tarts.
    The Anti-Social Century - The Atlantic
  • Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America.
    The Anti-Social Century - The Atlantic
  • But that is not a real relationship. Real relationships involve risk, vulnerability, effort and reciprocity — and that’s exactly what makes them meaningful.
    Overtone
  • their first instinct is not to win the argument but to protect the bond.
    whatever you choose in life, make sure you end up with a kind partner.
  • Detectors can be brittle to multiple factors such as text modifications (e.g. paraphrasing and spacing changes) and the use of generative models not seen during detector training.[2] By the same token, do not trust too much in your own interpretation. Research shows that people who use LLMs heavily themselves can correctly determine whether an article was generated by AI about 90% of the time, which means that if you are an expert user of LLMs and you tag 10 pages as being AI-generated, you've probably falsely accused one editor.[3] People who don't personally use LLMs much do only slightly be…
    Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing
  • That is a friendship of virtue. And in a long enough perspective, it is the only thing that matters in a relationship. Pleasure will come and go, as will utility.
    Sometimes the reason you can’t find people you resonate with is because you misread the ones you meet
  • Instead of using these tools as supplements, we seem to be leaning into them as substitutes.
    What happens when we turn to AI for life advice?
  • This possibility of loss — of accountability — imbues human relationships with a depth that algorithms can’t replicate.
    What happens when we turn to AI for life advice?
  • Technocalvinism makes a much stronger claim than technological determinism. Rather than identifying technology as a central driver of progress, it upholds it as the only relevant factor. It further argues that humans have no control over their own technological development. It uses this inevitability to argue that you are not at fault for choosing to accelerate technologies with negative effects.
    Technocalvinism - by Cosmos Institute and Luke Drago