flâneur

KL Yap

7 followers · 8 following · 374 views

on the atlas — 81

highlights — 60

  • Play in terrains where there is no training data. A surprising amount of the world’s information has never been written down. Be courageous. Go outside. Don’t just monitor the situation from your phone and your toilet seat: Get like Analyst #3 and turn up to the Strait of Hormuz. The more out-of-distribution your adventures, the bigger moat you have. And if you’re one of the only people to know something, you can sell that info too.
    The Old World Is Dying: Advice for 2026 graduates
  • I’m not asking you to give up your dreams of owning a bigger moon than everyone else in order to chase a tiny chance of becoming the future’s equivalent of Jesus. I’m suggesting you give them up in order to offer the future a washcloth, and see if it honors your memory.
    You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership
  • What if I told you this hunger to endure everything, this ceaseless reaching, this need to feel something more, is not curiosity, but self-exile? Somewhere along the way, you began to believe that living meant becoming exceptional; being seen; being chosen. That it meant consuming everything the world offers.
    the hunger to be everything. - by amber. - odetoapoet
  • What if I told you this hunger to endure everything, this ceaseless reaching, this need to feel something more, is not curiosity, but self-exile? Somewhere along the way, you began to believe that living meant becoming exceptional; being seen; being chosen. That it meant consuming everything the world offers.
    the hunger to be everything. - by amber. - odetoapoet
  • One can’t fake nor cram the base. It has to come from having genuinely cared about a lot of things over a long time. Some of the best pretraining is just experiencing things without overthinking them, being shaped by something before deciding what it’s for.
    Zugunruhe | Nathan's Notes
  • getting tenure while keeping your soul is the really hard part. To do this, you have to make sure you never lose that raw naive curiosity that got you interested in science in the first place. Don't get too wrapped up seriousness. The universe is a cool place; exploring it is fun
    advice
  • Have more fun than anyone has ever had before - after all, history remembers Aristippus! Start a cool group house - after all, history remembers Epicurus! Be extremely hot - history remembers Antinous too! Sell people the lowest-quality copper that has ever been sold, and live forever as a meme six thousand years later! But don’t waste this amazing opportunity you’ve been given on a vapid attempt to “escape the permanent underclass”.
    You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership
  • In such a situation, greatness is pathetically easy. A random woman gave Jesus a washcloth to wipe his face on the way to his crucifixion. She is now known as St. Veronica, patroness of laundry workers, and one out of every 2,500 girls in America is named in her honor.
    You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership
  • I submitted my manuscript this time last year in Vietnam. This year, my wife and I are writing from Bali. Tropical Asia makes for great writing retreats. We have lazy mornings that feature a swim and a big breakfast; then we spend the rest of the day writing before going out in the evening for some really spicy food.
    2025 letter | Dan Wang
  • Susannah Clarke offers a good case study of how authors can think about their work over time: an overlong first book that took decades to craft, followed by a shorter and more glittering second work. I can’t wait to see what her third book will be like.
    2025 letter | Dan Wang
  • People were running into each other all the time. Duchamp, d’Annunzio, Debussy at the premiere of the Rite of Spring. Stalin potentially tipping his hat at Hitler, as both residents of Vienna were known to take evening strolls through the gardens of Schönbrunn. Matisse bringing flowers to Picasso while the latter was sick. Rainer Maria Rilke being moody at the seaside with Sidonie Nadherny while she was running off into the arms of Karl Kraus. The celebrated love affairs between Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer, Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel, Alma Mahler and Oskar Kokoschka, Alma Mahler with Wal…
    2025 letter | Dan Wang
  • Rather, Haushofer has written a book about domesticity that manages to be gripping. The heroine spends her days milking her cow, minding her garden, and caring for her cat and dog while living in total isolation in the Alps. She would not survive if she lacked for any of the above. As Katherine Rundell once wrote, “It’s easier to trust a writer who writes great food: they are a person who has paid attention to the world.” Haushofer pays loving attention to the details of life. It never became boring to read about the narrator churning her butter, tending to her potato field, or chopping wood t…
    2025 letter | Dan Wang
  • I want to be a sunny Californian optimist about everything, including the fate of the written word.
    2025 letter | Dan Wang
  • A lot of the growth in the book trade is coming from romantasy and fairy smut, while the genre of nonfiction is in slight decline.
    2025 letter | Dan Wang
  • I did my best to have fun with it. It wasn’t as hard as I imagined
    2025 letter | Dan Wang
  • Tech has organizations I think of as internal civic institutions that try to build community. They bring people together in San Francisco or retreats north of the city, bringing together young people to learn from older folks.
    2025 letter | Dan Wang
  • Anywhere you’d be pleased by the simpler things. The crispness of morning air. A breakfast of toast and eggs and dark roast coffee with cream. In the motionless dark, I run loops around an empty plot of land.
    choice loneliness - starting from nix
  • Maybe I’d be content with any fate because I’d have chosen it. A flat in London with a dog and two children and a routine morning jog.
    choice loneliness - starting from nix
  • Does desire leave anyone intact? Life forks in less than a blink. All of a sudden the decision parameters upon which you assess success have been reconfigured
    choice loneliness - starting from nix
  • You might have a close knit community of peers and people who love you. But no one can determine the true size or shape of your life. When to dig your heels in and work like a dog, nor when to cut your losses after a long and thankless slog.
    choice loneliness - starting from nix
  • “The definition of humility in some ways is that you start progressing where you can start… …[T]he first task seems so small that you literally have to be on your knees to be humble enough to lower yourself to take that first step, you know, God, is that all I can do? I’m so useless. You might even be more useless than that because you might fail at it.”
    depression handbook | writing
  • it will happen again, I will have to design my life around this, around not being able to have something I dreamed of and really wanted to have. It is the sound of childhood dreams dying, the heart’s hard closing, the clattering of a metal shutter as the shop closes for the night.
    “I felt like that pinhole that couldn’t let all the light in.”
  • When you are close to the edge the only thing you can do is watch your feet.
    “I felt like that pinhole that couldn’t let all the light in.”
  • I beg God for a break, he says no, I say fine, I learn the lesson, I learn not to beg.
    “I felt like that pinhole that couldn’t let all the light in.”
  • They’re necessary — something that is real in my secret third sense, but not in the other more quantifiable ones, can’t be good work — but I think we can be more ambitious. Being real in all three ways can’t guarantee success, but I think it’s still a target worth aiming for.
    on doing Real work
  • The best reasons: I am writing this because I want X to be possible. Because I have a different perspective on Y. Or, even more basic: Because Z should be better-understood. I care about Z.
    on doing Real work
  • I am a master of self-destruction. Sometimes the only way to escape local maxima is to blow things up enough to scatter. To sail through spacetime hoping that the force of the explosion will propel you to a new peak, or at least the ascent of a larger one.
    thalassophilia - by hannah - a lot about nothing
  • It’s precisely this boundlessness that I miss — the kind that only comes from staring over the vast corn sea. The kind that drags you to the bathroom mirror and forces you to look at the bones poking through. The kind that drives you crazy enough to dream. Have you ever loved something so much you had to leave?
    thalassophilia - by hannah - a lot about nothing
  • I got a lot weirder work-wise this year. My edge in investing has always been with what I call Moths at the idea-stage, which means I spend as much of my time as possible trying to understand the strangest people I know.
    molly's 2025 notes - by Molly Mielke McCarthy - Milky
  • It carries something to your senses, it should have your adoration. If it is not special throw it away.
    Viscerality - by Simon Sarris - The Map is Mostly Water
  • There is a pleasure in needing to dress down, in craving ice water, in having the windows open at night to hear the crickets. There is even sometimes a pleasure in the languor of an inescapable heat. More broadly there is a pleasure in comfort but also a pleasure in discomfort. They give a different shape to our spirit.
    Viscerality - by Simon Sarris - The Map is Mostly Water
  • For weeks, I complained and moaned about endeavoring to read Anna Karenina this year, and months later I keep coming back to its themes of desire, self destruction and ambition.
    requiem for originality - by tina zhang - digital tinz
  • When I used to work in investment banking, my favorite word was “precedent”. As in “can you please send me a precedent for this merger model/LBO/CSC”. The value of a precedent is the comfort and safety of something that is “correct” to guide how you think.
    requiem for originality - by tina zhang - digital tinz
  • a long conversion narrative in which art is the religion.
    On Reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
  • There is a philosophy in this novel that’s implicit but never fully outlined. It is something like: the inner life is all that matters. What’s stored in you, your deepest impressions, are what counts; these are when you live most vividly, and it is this ‘feeling aliveness’ that art is really supposed to channel and convey.
    On Reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
  • All value accretes in the memory and imagination, and ultimately all of life is to serve that, with artistic creation being the highest point of life, the transmutation of memory and imagination into an externalized object, the work of art.
    On Reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
  • “You could extin­guish a star,” but you never will, because that power is occu­pied by the super­heroic task of living.
    You could extinguish a star
  • In any version, what’s remark­able is that, even beneath such a burden: life con­tinues. Buoyed by fan­tastic powers within.
    You could extinguish a star
  • There’s lots more to it — decades of nar­ra­tive embroidery; a sur­feit of clones — but this is the core: “You could extin­guish a star,” but you never will, because that power is occu­pied by the task of living.
    You could extinguish a star
  • People will tell you that you have to do interesting, innovative, and impactful things, and this is the way you have to do that. It is not true. There are many paths to God.
    i was half myself without you, now i feel so complete
  • Before TKS, my life was waiting, waiting, waiting. Waiting till I’m old enough to do anything real.
    i was half myself without you, now i feel so complete
  • “What needs to happen for your success to be inevitable?”
    Bottlenecks & Thresholds - by Sophie
  • On a drunken evening walk after our final exam, my friend and I stood at an empty intersection under the endless Iowa sky, and she confided that math was the first thing in her life that felt big enough. Years later, I realized that I had never known her eyes were green, which I attribute to our time staring at chalkboards together, always looking in a shared direction, never at each other.
    Taste in Math - Colossus
  • Consider: The real name for groups that don’t fit an orderly pattern is “sporadic.” Earlier, I called them misfit creatures. Daniel Gorenstein called them pathologies. Fellow mathematician Robert Griess called some of them pariahs. The name should give you the right feeling, no details required. And of all the sporadic groups (the misfit creatures, pathologies, and pariahs of the Atlas), the most eldritch is called the Monster.
    Taste in Math - Colossus
  • Some of you guys wake up at 5am to make almond croissants, some of you watch golf on TV, and some of you are willing to drive an 80,000-pound semi truck full of fidget spinners across the country. There are people out there who like the sound of rubbing sheets of Styrofoam together, people who watch 94-part YouTube series about the Byzantine Empire, people who can spend an entire long-haul flight just staring straight ahead. Do you not realize that, to me, and to almost everyone else, you are all completely nuts?
    Face it: you're a crazy person - by Adam Mastroianni
  • For example, Taylor Street in San Francisco housed the “Y Scraper,” a twelve-story building that was one of the only places in the city that offered furnished apartments on a month to-month basis. According to The Launch Pad (2012), thirteen YC-funded startups were working from this building, including Justin.tv (W07), Weebly (W07), Dropbox (S07), Xobni (S06), and Scribd (S06).
    A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place
  • except intelligence, or everything except energy
    A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place
  • “what is a capital efficient way to inspire the smartest young people to be 100 times more ambitious early in their careers?”
    Tyler Cowen is the best curator of talent in the world
  • Maybe because few other things in life reward this, earnest people are so delighted to be recognized that they can’t help but refer friends.
    Tyler Cowen is the best curator of talent in the world
  • I f a n e t e r n a l t r a ve l e r w e r e t o cr o ss i t i n a n y d i r e ct i o n , a f t e r c e n t u r i e s h e w o u l d se e t h a t t h e sa m e vo l u m e s w e r e r e p e a t e d i n t h e sa m e d i s o r d e r ( w h i ch , t h u s r e p e a t e d , w o u l d b e a n o r d e r : t h e O r d e r ) . M y so l i t u d e i s g l a d d e n e d b y t h i s e l e g a n t h o p
    the-library-of-babel-by-jorge-luis-borges.pdf