flâneur

Jonah Dykhuizen

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on the atlas — 10

highlights — 42

  • The short version is that Aggregators had already won the biggest categories that were susceptible to Aggregators, and that the remaining categories were too small to support the necessary model: spend a lot upfront, and make it back on small margin dollars over a huge amount of transactions.
    Vertical Integrators - Not Boring by Packy McCormick
  • Democrats lump tech people in with rich people (bad) and assume a selfish motivation. Tech people view themselves as making the world better through a capitalist system that rewards them for doing so. For Democrats, “rich” is the operative word. For people in tech, “capitalist” is. The Democrats look at the outcome of the process, one that has produced individuals who are wealthier than entire small cities. Tech cares about the process itself; protecting the opportunity to innovate, compete, and implement is the top priority, wealth is a byproduct.
    Why the Democrats Lost Tech - Not Boring by Packy McCormick
  • Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtu
    The Case Against Travel | The New Yorker
  • They may speak of their travel as though it were transformative, a “once in a lifetime” experience, but will you be able to notice a difference in their behavior, their beliefs, their moral compass? Will there be any difference at all?
    The Case Against Travel | The New Yorker
  • The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return
    The Case Against Travel | The New Yorker
  • to be a tourist is to have already decided that it is not one’s own feelings that count
    The Case Against Travel | The New Yorker
  • Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best
    The Case Against Travel | The New Yorker
  • Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.
    The Case Against Travel | The New Yorker
  • The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude.
    The Disadvantages of an Elite Education -
  • Emerson says, he reported, that one of the purposes of friendship is to equip you for solitude
    The Disadvantages of an Elite Education -
  • There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics
    The Disadvantages of an Elite Education -
  • I wasn’t aware of the phenomenon myself until I heard about it from a couple of graduate students in my department, one from Yale, one from Harvard. They were talking about trying to write poetry, how friends of theirs from college called it quits within a year or two while people they know from less prestigious schools are still at it. Why should this be? Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrif…
    The Disadvantages of an Elite Education -
  • As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists.
    The Disadvantages of an Elite Education -
  • Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is?
    The Case Against Travel | The New Yorker
  • Me, I’m not ahistorical or immune to biography. That’s for the winners of history (men) (so far).
    The Paris Review - What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?
  • Authority says biography is fallacy. Authority believes the work exists in an ideal state (ahistorical, alpine, snowy, pure). Authority ignores the natural feeling that arises from biographical knowledge of a subject. Authority gets snippy about stuff like that. Authority claims it is able to appreciate the work free of biography, of history. Authority sides with the (male) maker, against the audience.
    The Paris Review - What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?
  • Which of us is seeing more clearly? The one who had the ability—some might say the privilege—to remain untroubled by the filmmaker’s attitudes toward females and history with girls? Who had the ability to watch the art without committing the biographical fallacy? Or the one who couldn’t help but notice the antipathies and urges that seemed to animate the project?
    The Paris Review - What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?
  • o watch Annie Hall is to feel, for just a moment, that one belongs to humanity. Watching, you feel almost mugged by that sense of belonging. That fabricated connection can be more beautiful than love itself. And that’s what we call great art. In case you were wondering. Look, I don’t get to go around feeling connected to humanity all the time. It’s a rare pleasure. And I’m supposed to give it up just because Woody Allen misbehaved? It hardly seems fair.
    The Paris Review - What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?
  • A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.
    The Paris Review - What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?
  • Because the finishing is the part that makes the artist. The artist must be monster enough not just to start the work, but to complete it. And to commit all the little savageries that lie in between.
    The Paris Review - What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?
  • ocus less on AI as something separate from humans, and more on tools that enhance human cognition rather than replacing it.
    My techno-optimism
  • Building tools to help people survive and even live comfortable lives independently or semi-independently of long international supply chains seems like a valuable defensive technology, and one with a low risk of turning out to be useful for offense.
    My techno-optimism
  • The more that we can build personalized tools for blocking people on Twitter, in-browser tools for detecting scams and collective tools for telling apart misinformation and truth, the less we have to fight over censorship
    My techno-optimism
  • a defense-favoring world makes it easier for healthier, more open and more freedom-respecting forms of governance to thrive.
    My techno-optimism
  • A defense-favoring world is a better world, for many reasons
    My techno-optimism
  • Across the board, I see far too many plans to save the world that involve giving a small group of people extreme and opaque power and hoping that they use it wisely.
    My techno-optimism
  • Does being an e/acc require being an America maximalist, betting everything on both the government's present and future morals and the country's future success?
    My techno-optimism
  • nthusiasm about modern military technology as a force for good seems to require believing that the dominant technological power will reliably be one of the good guys in most conflicts, now and in the future
    My techno-optimism
  • With modern surveillance to collect information, and modern AI to interpret it, there may be no place to hide.
    My techno-optimism
  • More generally, my basic fear is that the same kinds of managerial technologies that allow OpenAI to serve over a hundred million customers with 500 employees will also allow a 500-person political elite, or even a 5-person board, to maintain an iron fist over an entire country
    My techno-optimism
  • And so all in all, humans becoming pets seems like an attractor that is very hard to escape.
    My techno-optimism
  • It seems very hard to have a "friendly" superintelligent-AI-dominated world where humans are anything other than pets.
    My techno-optimism
  • A big reason to be worried centers around instrumental convergence: for a very wide class of goals that a superintelligent entity could have, two very natural intermediate steps that the AI could take to better achieve those goals are (i) consuming resources, and (ii) ensuring its safety.
    My techno-optimism
  • t is intentional action, coordinated through public discourse and culture shaping the perspectives of governments, scientists, philanthropists and businesses, and not an inexorable "techno-capital machine", that had solved these problems.
    My techno-optimism
  • A major exception to the trend of pretty much everything getting better over the last hundred years is climate change
    My techno-optimism
  • Our rapid advances in technology are likely going to be the most important social issue in the twenty first century, and so it's important to think about them carefully.
    My techno-optimism
  • We need active human intention to choose the directions that we want, as the formula of "maximize profit" will not arrive at them automatically.
    My techno-optimism
  • The alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities
    OpenAI & Grand Strategy - Not Boring by Packy McCormick
  • if you hire all the smartest people and put them to work on a problem where their success can be measured, you win.
    Five Founders
  • if the thesis that good software combined with cheaper hardware is better than more expensive hardware alone, the financial picture of companies in big spend categories begins to shift towards looking more like software companies
    Tech is Going to Get Much Bigger
  • The same revenue in the hands of a well-run tech company is worth multiples of what it would be in the hands of an incumbent.
    Tech is Going to Get Much Bigger
  • Starting [at a young age] he’s read everything that he could find about business. The subject that interests him, he’s read newspapers, biographies, trade press
    Curius / Onboarding